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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25243765">Try to Come Tonight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo'>liminalweirdo</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Ginger Snaps (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(technically its sharing a couch but whatever), Canon Divergent, F/M, Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Fix-It of Sorts, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Peripheral Characters, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Sharing a Bed, Sisters, Slow Burn, soft mutual pining (if ya squint), the cure works</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:29:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>76,951</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25243765</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Turns out curing lycanthropy won't fix the wounds caused by growing up.</p><p> </p><p>Predominantly Brigitte/Sam, with glimpses of other relationships (platonic and non) throughout</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Brigitte Fitzgerald/Ginger Fitzgerald, Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam, Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam McDonald, but tbh no more than was in the film</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. before</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>She didn’t go back to the greenhouse after Ginger was cured. To be honest, she half-forgot. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>…That’s mostly true.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Curing Ginger wasn’t what she thought it would be, wasn’t like curing Jason. By the time they got back to their house, to their basement bedroom, stumbling down the stairs together until Brigitte didn’t know if Ginger was hanging onto her for support or trying to drag her down under her. Brigitte didn’t know why she felt like they had to make it back to their room, but it was this intense, incessant pull — impossible to resist. She thought of the knife in the drawer of their dresser more than once, and more than once Brigitte thought that she should have asked for help as they half-circled the room, the beds between them, and Ginger’s eyes flashing strangely in the dark.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Brigitte couldn’t breathe properly. She could see Ginger slipping away between heartbeats, like water through her hands, like a flame snuffing out. Finally she reached out and grabbed Ginger’s wrist and the sound her sister made wasn’t human. Ginger spun them, thrust Brigitte down onto the bed, Ginger’s, and piled on top of her. It hurt, and there were claws in her upper arms, sliding in deep, and Ginger’s knee pressed to the soft space where her ribs met, just above her belly. The sounds Ginger made weren’t words anymore, but Brigitte thought there was a familiar cadence like Ginger meant them to be. That scared her more than anything else. More than the claws in her skin, more than Ginger’s sharp sharp teeth, more than her ghost-pale eyes, and the way her face was warping and wrinkling into something that wasn’t girl at all. Who would call her Bee if Ginger didn’t do it? Brigitte struggled, squirming and gasping and straining beneath her, but Ginger was so strong. Ginger let go of one of her arms to grasp her face — to keep her still or break her neck — Brigitte remembers thinking that Ginger could probably do either without even blinking, without even struggling. Still, Brigitte took her moment and plunged the needle into Ginger’s side and pressed the plunger. It took a second, but then Ginger roared. Her saliva spattering Brigitte’s face. For a moment it was all weight and heat and terror, and then Ginger was gone, reeling back. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Brigitte caught her breath all at once and sat up on the bed to watch Ginger claw at her abdomen, but the needle was still in Brigitte’s hand, pressed against the mattress, and empty now. Ginger started shaking, seizing, and Brigitte cried her name, but she was too scared to get close. She could only watch as Ginger coughed up white bile, foamy, like what comes out of the mouths and noses of roadkill. Brigitte remembered that deer in the ditch when they were eleven, and how it looked so small, but was already too heavy to move, its body frozen to the ground. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Ginger had coughed and choked and spit foaming bile to the floor until suddenly she was on her hands and knees, her spine arching like it was trying to escape her body. It wasn’t at all like with Jason and Brigitte thought</em> “You could kill her trying to save her”<em>, but in the end Ginger, throat thick with terror and tears, said “Bee?” and searched for her with blue, wolfen, unseeing eyes, and Brigitte was there with her on the floor inside of a heartbeat, her knees sliding over the cement, slick with blood and saliva. She wrapped her arms around Ginger’s shoulders and clung to her until the shaking in both of them stopped.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When they finally pulled apart, she was Ginger again. Mostly. There was still white in her hair, her fingers still ended in claws, but her face was the same as it had always been. There was blood in her mouth, though, and she spit these sharp pieces of teeth out into her her hand and onto the floor where they weren’t even shards big enough to clatter. But her eyes were green, like Brigitte’s, and she was there, again. She was there, and Brigitte had her sister back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Only it’s never just that simple. That’s something Brigitte’s starting to figure out.</em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. november 1st: early morning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Brigitte keeps jumping at small noises, thinking Pam or Henry is going to come downstairs as she cleans the floor of blood and spit and bile. She takes care of Ginger and washes the bedsheets because she’d bled onto them. Their bedroom door is dead-bolted but the trek to the laundry room and back where she’s unprotected by the flip of a brass lock makes her anxious, and she has no idea how she would explain the blood or the state that she and Ginger are in to either of them. To anyone.</p><p>With the sheets in the dyer, Brigitte swipes at the steam on the mirror in their bathroom. Ginger is in the tub behind her because she couldn’t stop shivering and the air is heavy with heat from the water. Brigitte twists to see the marks in her arms — in the mirror she can see that they’ve already bruised a nasty black and blue, five jagged gouges from Ginger’s claws.</p><p>Ginger’s fingers still end in claws, long and dark, but they soften in the bath, and Ginger peels them out, like shards of shrapnel from beneath her skin, leaving her own blunt, very human fingernails beneath, softened and cracked. Blood swirls pinkly in the bath-water, and Brigitte crouches on the other side and touches Ginger’s wet hair, presses her face into Ginger’s temple as Ginger cries. Brigitte thinks maybe they both do.</p><p>Ginger still has a tail, but it’s musculature has faded. It just hangs from her spine, limp, and so they coil it up and tape it flat. Things to sort out, later. The bruises on Brigitte’s arms are gone by the time they drain the tub, and the bloody punctures there are just soft pink scars, slightly raised. Because she’s infected now. But she knew that that would happen when she cut her hand open in Sam’s greenhouse. </p><p>But she knows what to do, this time around. Her digital watch reads 3:27, and she’s so tired, but she can’t sleep yet. She’s afraid she’ll wake up and have lost parts of herself already. They sneak upstairs and get the last of Pamela’s dried monkshood and cook it down into a cure over a candle in their room. Brigitte refills the needle she used on Ginger and thinks that maybe that’s bad, but she’s infected anyway. It can’t infect her again, right? </p><p>She’s watched Sam make the cure already, and she’s used it once on Jason and once on Ginger because he’d had the forethought to fill another syringe with monkshood, and have it ready at the greenhouse bash on Halloween night. Brigitte knows she should know how to do it by now, but what if she doesn’t? What if she’s done something wrong, forgotten a step, messed up the dosage? What if…</p><p>But it’s all they’ve got. Still, she can’t do it. She can slide the needle under her skin, but she can’t press the plunger down. She can’t, and she knows in her heart that it’s because she’s scared it will kill her. She’s only been infected for a handful of hours. What if she’s still too human to handle something that’s mostly poison? What if the cure kills her? When Ginger still needs her? </p><p>Also, she doesn’t want to die, she realizes, suddenly. She doesn’t want to die anymore.</p><p>Ginger sits beside her as Brigitte shakes and shivers and draws the needle out to makes a fist and find a vein again, but the second time she tries, and the third, she can’t even get it under her skin. </p><p>“Ginge,” she says, her voice breaking. Because what if it’s all in her head. What if it’s the virus stopping her, what if she’s…?</p><p>“No,” Ginger says, “It doesn’t work that fast. This shit isn’t right. It feels wrong.” Ginger takes the syringe from her and empties it into the sink. She turns on the water and washes it down and then she comes back to her on the bed, and wraps Brigitte up into her arms.</p><p>~</p><p>The next morning, there’s blood in the toilet after Brigitte pees and she spends about five minutes freaking out about it until Ginger pushes the door open to find her just standing with her hand over her mouth in the middle of the bathroom.</p><p>“The fuck, did you start the rag?”</p><p>“I dunno… I dunno.”</p><p>Ginger digs out the pads and Brigitte wears it, but there’s no more blood. This isn’t natural ‘womanly changes’ this is something totally else.</p><p>They don’t go to school that day.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. transit</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It must be nice, Brigitte thinks, to be able to blame everything on some mysterious Beast of Bailey Downs. That’s what the headlines in the paper claims three days later on Sunday morning. Mr. Wayne and the janitor — Kee Min-Jong, both the work of some mysterious creature. And Brigitte thinks that maybe Ginge was right. No one thinks chicks do shit like this. The police issue a neighbourhood curfew, and an order to keep pets inside because they have to look like they’re making headway, even when they’re not.</p><p>Also, Pamela’s out of dried flowers. They ground up the last of them only to wash them down the drain.</p><p>She knows she needs to find Sam. Sam has clean gear, Sam guessed the dosage for Ginger and got it right, and besides, she kind of owes it to him, to show. Except every day that goes by where she doesn’t… </p><p>It’s easy, she thinks, not to see him. It’s easy with Ginger back. And she knows that that makes her the worst kind of bitch, but she’s spent her life not caring. Still, every day that passes brings her closer to twenty-eight, which was the number of days it took for Ginger to change, for Brigitte to almost lose her entirely.</p><p>Monday is school again and Brigitte goes even though she’s clammy and feverish because she doesn’t want Pamela to ask any questions and also she’s afraid of what she’ll do if she’s left home alone.</p><p>So far, she hasn’t done anything at all, but Ginger keeps looking at her sidelong with this expression that Brigitte can’t read.</p><p>In the shower that evening her fingers brush over a collection of stiff, spiky hairs growing out of each of the marks on her arms. The hairs are darker than Ginger’s were, almost grey and Brigitte’s vision goes white. She has to sit down in the shower before she passes out. She reaches out to shut off the water before she’s done, nausea roiling through her, closing her throat off. There’s a rush of cooler air, and then Ginger’s there, cool fingers brushing Brigitte’s shoulders like she’s not afraid of her, or what she’s becoming.</p><p>Brigitte thinks that Ginger has always been better than she is. </p><p>“Okay, we have to do something,” Ginger says. “Tomorrow, we’ll skip class.” Brigitte can only nod and breathe and try not to throw up.</p><p>That isn’t what happens though. It snows overnight and into the afternoon, and Pamela insists that she drive them to school, so they miss the two morning busses that go downtown. There’s another  bus at lunch so after third period, they’re practically first out of the classroom, both of them already packed up and antsy as hell. They leave by the school’s side door and trudge through the snow drifts out to the street. They’re almost to the sidewalk when their History teacher spots them. </p><p>There’s something about the way society’s set up that restricts kids in a way that’s almost impossible to break free from. (Brigitte thinks this sitting beside Ginger in the principal’s office, her gut hurting, and <em>fuming</em> at their lack of power). She used to think that adults were useful for some things. That they knew things that she didn’t yet, or couldn’t, and could impart that knowledge. Like Pam knows about guys, and Nurse Ferry knows about… menstruation, and Henry knows about driving the car. Only it turned out that most of them were wrong. Or, at least, not exactly right. And Brigitte thinks that it’s stupid that these people should have so much control, considering she knows that adults don’t have a clue. Most of them.</p><p>Sam though, he was right about the monkshood, and the dosage. He believed her when she told him something that sounded totally nuts. Sam’s different. Beside her Ginger fidgets and sighs and shifts, and Brigitte chews on a strand of her hair, watching everyone else move around. She sometimes thinks adults forget about you as a punishment, that they do it just to piss you off. She feels like they sit there for an hour waiting to be Spoken To. Her insides feel like they’re pushing her spine out of alignment and, she thinks, they probably are. She can’t be worried about whether or not Sam’s pissed off, she has to see him.</p><p>“Think we should go to the greenhouse,” Brigitte whispers to Ginger, looking straight ahead. Ginger goes still, but doesn’t give any other indication she’s heard. To Brigitte’ surprise, she doesn’t argue, and that scares her more than anything because Ginger never takes things seriously unless they really are serious.</p><p>Their plans, however, continue to be thwarted. Henry’s sister is coming for dinner and so the girls are expected to be there to spend time with the family. Brigitte almost bursts into tears when Pam says it, seconds after they come in the door. Ginger elbows her. “You’re sick, tell her,” she says.</p><p>“No,” Brigitte hisses behind Pamela’s back. </p><p>“<em>I’ll</em> do fucking dinner, you pretend to be in bed while you go to the greenhouse. We’re running out of time, Bee.”</p><p>We. We are. It’s this impossible rush of relief, because they’re in it together again.</p><p>“She’ll never believe me.”</p><p>“Bee. You look like shit. Cry a little, just— it’ll work, I promise.”</p><p>Brigitte gives her a look, half rolls her eyes. “Mom,” she says, “I don’t feel good,” and it surprises her how easily the tears come. Like they’re not even fake, because it’s true, she doesn’t. She hurts and she’s feverish and something horrible is claiming her body, and if it weren’t for Ginge, no one in this house would believe it. And she’s tired, god, she’s so fucking tired, she doesn’t know how much longer she can do this. And Pam looks at her, and Ginge was right because she’s all “Oh, baby,” and then it’s her cool, soft hands on Brigitte’s cheek, and her forehead, and a glass of orange juice thrust into her hands and “Straight to bed young lady.”</p><p>Brigitte heads for the basement stairs, past Ginger who gives her this look that almost cracks Brigitte up. She has to bite the inside of her cheek, hard. Blood floods her mouth and when she presses her tongue over her teeth she finds that they’re sharp, on the left side. That sobers her up pretty quick. They were normal this morning.</p><p>~</p><p>She changes in their bedroom into something warmer. Her proper winter boots are upstairs on the shoe rack, so she can’t get those. She doubles up on socks instead, finds another sweater, her warmest coat, and then waits until she can hear everyone at the table which means she’s in the clear. She pushes her coat out the window and then, one foot on the headboard of Ginger’s bed boosts herself up and out the window. She pulls on her coat and runs before anyone can stop her.</p><p>It’s freaky at night, especially closer to the greenhouse. The suburbs just end, abruptly, and then it’s just houses along the highway, and the field she can cut through. Usually. But the snow’s too high in the grass, now, and it would take her twice as long to trudge through it. She pulls up her hood and walks the thin edge of the highway, facing the cars. No one stops, no one honks their horns at her. In fact, there’s not even that many people on the roads, which means it’s dark. No streetlights out here. She remembers when the things in the darkness that scared her only existed in storybooks. They’d scared her anyway.</p><p>The greenhouse is dark, too, but she knows Sam’s not asleep. It’s only eight-thirty or something, even though the sun set hours ago. She wonders if he’s already locked everything up, and if he’ll even hear her knocking. She reaches out and tests the door, and it creaks open easily. She steps inside, her back to the door to close it gently, safe from whatever’s lurking out there in the night, but that’s where she gets stuck. The rows of plants loom before her, and she feels kind of like she doesn’t belong here. Not that she ever has, only he used to not kick her out, at least, so that was something. She’s afraid to see him, afraid to face him, afraid to find out he’s mad, because he should be — has every right to be, but at the same time… well, it’s not like she played him. Ginger needed her. That’s true. And she thinks he’ll listen to her, because he always has before. </p><p>She swallows, takes a breath, and then makes her way down towards the back. There’s a light still on in Sam’s office — just the little desk lamp, and papers still out. If he just ducked inside for something, she’s going to freak the hell out of him when he comes back out, standing half in shadows. She feels fucking sick with anxiety. Her mind runs through about ten thousand things that could go wrong — and… she shouldn't just have come over unannounced or uninvited, she’s always been taught that. But then, she’s been doing it a lot, lately.</p><p>She touches her tongue to the sting in her cheek that— oh, it’s gone now. Healed already. </p><p>So she doesn’t really have any other choice. She has to just do this and see how it goes. After all, Ginge is back home, surrounded by scalloped potatoes and ham, being tortured by their parents and their aunt who is going to ask her about <em>school</em> and <em>boyfriends</em>, like people their age have nothing else going on in their lives. Ginger’s suffering for her, so Brigitte can’t back out now.</p><p>She crosses the last few paces to the door to Sam’s room and knocks. There’s a voice — not his. Brigitte panics and takes a quick step back because fuck, she’s interrupting something she shouldn’t—</p><p>But then he opens the door and she’s hit with how… the same he looks. Like, how familiar. His eyes widen when he sees her and, lit by the warm glow of the room behind him, he takes the cigarette out of his mouth awkwardly, left-handed, because his right is in a sling. “Hey,” he says in this unreadable way, but at least he’s not <em>just</em> mad, she thinks. She has an in here, a chance. That unties her tongue. She takes a breath, but then the shadows shift. Brigitte feels the darkness close in around her as someone blocks the rest of the light filtering in from behind Sam and Brigitte feels the air swept right from her lungs because it’s Trina. </p><p>Brigitte feels herself twitch, like she’s containing this entire-body flinch. <em>Oh</em>, she thinks, and then there’s a voice in her head that sounds a lot like Ginger’s that says <em>Did you think you were the only girl he ever had over?</em></p><p><em>It’s not like that</em>, Brigitte thinks back, fiercely. And she came here for a reason. So fuck Trina.</p><p>“What is she doing here?” Trina asks.</p><p>“Well, I dunno, Trina,” Sam says, eyes on his cigarette where he’s pinching the ash off. He shifts to roll it gently out against the door frame, his arm cutting through the space between Trina and Brigitte and it’s almost like protection, but for who? There’s something in his voice that reads as annoyance, only Brigitte doesn’t know who that’s directed at, either. Probably her, since she’s like… kind of turning into a monster. She kind of feels like she’s stepped into quicksand and she’s rapidly losing ground beneath her feet. “I just…” she begins, and she’s about ten-thousand times less collected than she wanted to be. She has the sentence ready, but she doesn’t know how to say it with Trina here. Why is <em>Trina</em> here?</p><p>Sam’s slipped the cigarette back into his pack and he’s watching her as he pockets it and Brigitte’s scrambling to put her words in the right order, only she feels like she’s forgotten English. And then Sam saves her, and tells Trina “We’ll just be a second,” and he steps out with Brigitte into the half-dark greenhouse office.</p><p>“What?” Trina asks, half-laughing, like she kind of can’t believe it.</p><p>“Come on,” Sam says, low, eyes on her. Trina gives him this look like she just cannot fucking believe it. “Just. I’m sorry, I’ll be in in a sec,” he tells her, and she scoffs this breath like <em>whatever</em>, and turns back to the room. His room. He shuts the door, makes sure it's closed. They’re only lit by the papered windows now, separating the two rooms, and the little desk lamp.</p><p>“Sorry,” Brigitte says. She wants to fucking disappear.</p><p>“Forget it,” Sam tells her, and moves down towards the other end and, Brigitte realizes, away from his door, so they won’t be overheard. She follows him, a few paces behind.</p><p>“So,” he says, when they’re in the far corner. Brigitte looks up at him. It’s easier to search his eyes in the dark. “What happened?” he asks, “I didn’t see you, before.”</p><p>“It worked,” she says. “On Ginger, too.”</p><p>Sam exhales like releasing tension. Like he cared. “Good. Jesus, Brigitte… that’s good. Right?”</p><p>She nods, and then starts about three sentences at once. “S— but… I’m… uh…” <em>Fuck, don’t be a crisis, get it together.</em> “W— we… ran out of monkshood and… um.”</p><p>Sam moves, only it’s not away. He reaches out to her and she raises her shoulders around her ears and steps back. “Jesus,” he says. He doesn’t come any closer, but only, she thinks, because she doesn’t want him to. Because she stepped back. She wonders what he would’ve done if she didn’t. “You’re still infected,” he says, softly.</p><p>“I tried to give myself the cure. We made it again, but I couldn’t.” She’s whispering, fast, hyper-aware of Trina in the next room. “I…” <em>got scared</em> “I thought… you guessed right last time, and I didn’t know how much to… to take, and I thought maybe the flowers you planted grew…?”</p><p>“That’s… not until the spring, Brigitte.”</p><p>“Okay,” she says. “So then… um, if we get more monkshood, can I— could you… help?”</p><p>“Where did you get the dried ones?”</p><p>“Our mom got them at a craft store. I just— I’ll go after school this week…”</p><p>Sam’s looking at her like he can’t quite believe it, what she’s saying, and that’s scary, that’s like a nightmare. Like maybe he’s going to call bullshit this time, because she’s already dicked him around.</p><p>“Yeah, it’s… already been a few days since Halloween, Brigitte.”</p><p>She winces, because here it is. She's shit for not showing when she said she would, and he knows it. He knows that about her now. “I know.” <em>I’m sorry.</em> “I thought it would go different, I dunno, but— Ginge needed me, after I gave her the cure, it was— I really couldn’t come back here that night.” <em>I’m sorry, I’m sorry,</em> why can’t she just <em>say</em> it? She wishes she could explain why it felt so hard, but she knows she can’t. And he’s listening to her, so still and so quiet she thinks she might make it through this awful conversation. Until he says something that just fucking tears her apart.</p><p>“Yeah, no, I meant: It’s been a few days, so, are you okay?”</p><p>She looks up at him, startled because fuck— no, she’s not, she’s turning into a lycanthrope and she’s been stalling all this time, and he should be mad. She thought he’d be pissed, after everything he did for her, and she couldn’t even show.</p><p>She’s crying, shit. Furious with herself, she wipes her face hard with her sleeves and keeps her head down, but he already knows; she’s breathing like crying. She’s been willing, for nearly a week, to let this thing take her over because she couldn’t get up the courage to see Sam. She doesn’t even know what that makes her, except a coward and, maybe… </p><p>She’s not okay. She shakes her head.</p><p>“I… hey, don’t. Listen, Brigitte, don’t worry about the monkshood, I’ll find some. Tomorrow, okay? I’ll find some, I swear. Just… we’ll do it tomorrow, okay? Whenever. When you’re done school. Just come here, I’ll have everything ready. We’ll fix this.”</p><p>That makes it worse. God, fuck, she’s so relieved, and so exhausted.</p><p>“How’d you get here?” he asks. “Where’s Ginger?”</p><p>“Home. I walked, there’s this family dinner so…” she shakes her head, still trying to wipe the tears away before they fall, still breathing like an idiot.</p><p>“Okay,” Sam says, “Hey, fuck— don’t cry… Brigitte, c’mon.” And it’s different from the way he said it to Trina. <em>Come on.</em> “We’ll get this sorted.”</p><p>“I’m sorry I didn’t show.”</p><p>“You had other things going on. What would you even have… forget it, it’s fine. You want… do you want me to take you home?”</p><p>“It’s okay,” she says, but she does. Her head hurts. So does her stomach, her spine. Her fucking skin hurts from the fever, she’s still finding all this blood in the toilet bowl every time she has to piss, like her insides are tearing themselves apart, and she’s tired, god. She feels like she’s been running on fumes since the beginning of October.</p><p>“It’s dark,” he says. She’s half okay now, not crying anymore, but now she’s just… all stuffed up and her breathing keeps hitching. She sniffles, deeply self-conscious. There’s snot on her sleeve when she passes it under her nose. Fucking… fantastic. “C’mon, I’ll take you,” he tells her. “You want to go now?”</p><p>“What about Trina?”</p><p>Sam’s quiet a moment too long. He says “Let me get my keys, okay?” and when she nods, he does. She goes to wait out front, even though it’s cold. She’s never cried in front of Trina Sinclair, and she’s not about to start now.</p><p>~</p><p>In the van, Sam shuts the music off and Brigitte’s grateful because it’s cacophonous, just sounds like noise and she’s realizing, now that she can smell him, too, in a way that’s sort of intense and terrifying. It’s like, the warm livingness of him, the pulsebeat of his blood. She feels the salivary glands at the back of her jaw contract painfully. He also smells like plants and soil and something heavier that’s probably weed. He smells like the greenhouse and, beneath that, floating somewhere in the middle of the surface scent and the deeper, living one, there’s something sharper, acrid — not like sweat, but like stress, tension, pain maybe. It’s like rust on metal, it shouldn’t be there. In the cab of the van, it’s really intense, and for a moment, between that and the music, it was overwhelming. They’re quiet until Sam pulls out of the long drive to the greenhouse and onto the street.</p><p>“Can I… roll down a window?” she asks, on the half-deserted streets.</p><p>“Yeah. You okay?”</p><p>“Just… this all makes me feel like shit.”</p><p>“Why’d you do it?”</p><p>It’s cold with the window down, but it just smells like winter and dying grass, and that’s better. Brigitte takes a deep breath. “It was the only way I could get her to come back with me.” Sam’s quiet, but she knows what he’s thinking: <em>that was stupid.</em> “It worked, didn’t it?” she asks him.</p><p>He breathes a laugh through his nose that touches his mouth, but comes nowhere near his eyes. “Guess you’re right.”</p><p>They’re quiet for a while, but it’s not the quiet they shared, sometimes, in the greenhouse, this one’s heavy. She takes a breath. “Is your arm broken?”</p><p>“No,” is all he says. Maybe he doesn’t want to bore her with the details, maybe he doesn’t want to make her feel worse. Or maybe he <em>is</em> mad, or tired, or fed up with her.</p><p>“You don’t have to do this,” she says.</p><p>“What’re you gonna do if I don’t?”</p><p>“We’d figure something out.” Her and Ginger.</p><p>“Listen… I want to help.” He looks at her and for a second, she looks back before his eyes are back on the road. “But if you just show tomorrow, and then never again, that’s cool.”</p><p>She feels that like a stab to the chest and turns her face more towards the window. </p><p>“Shit, I meant… like, you’re not— you don’t owe me anything, that’s all. If you don’t want to come again after tomorrow, you don’t have to. I’m not going to hold that against you.”</p><p>She’s kind of scrambling to try and figure this out — whether he does or doesn’t want her there, so she doesn’t say anything in case she says something wrong. But then the silence is worse, so, “Okay,” she finally manages, but then realizes that it sounds like an agreement, rather than understanding, and Sam fidgets, slides his hand over the wheel, touches the handle for the windshield wipers, then changes his mind, but she can’t read his face. She thinks that now that they’re here, and he’s not pissed, maybe she could keep visiting the greenhouse, but what would they talk about, now? And besides, she doesn’t understand the mechanics of all these things — like if coming back means she owes him something in return. Or if Trina being there tonight means that they’re still together, even after what Trina told her the other night, when she accused Brigitte of taking her dog.</p><p>
  <em>He’s a cherry hound. He’s into virgins? If you are so fucking smart, you won’t give him the satisfaction. Somebody, just once, shouldn’t give that fucker the satisfaction.</em>
</p><p>She’d told Brigitte she was as big a cunt as Ginger was and Brigitte remembers, with this sick sort of twist in her gut, that she’d just said she wasn’t, instead of defending Ginger. She should have defended her, but… but Ginger was— had been—</p><p>But things are different now. And Ginger couldn’t help it, that night. It was the wolf, and not Ginger. Brigitte kept telling herself that. Just like maybe it’s the wolf and not Brigitte who asks now: “So are you back with Trina, or?”</p><p>It’s like it sets off fucking sirens in her head, as soon as it’s out of her mouth. She can’t fucking believe she said it, because that means she cares what Sam’s doing, who he’s dating, who he’s… Brigitte feels sick and she shuts her eyes, fingers gripping the edge of the window where the wind makes them so cold, just so she can try and steady herself.</p><p>“No,” Sam says. “That’s. No.”</p><p>“I mean…” Brigitte says. She looks at him, insinuating what she wants to say:<em> So what’s she doing there?</em></p><p>Sam glances at her, just for a second. “I don’t tell her about what you’re dealing with,” Sam says. He says it real quiet like he’s second-guessing himself the whole time. He means <em>I’m not telling you what she’s dealing with.</em> And Brigitte can’t even argue with that. She wants to get out, she kind of wants to throw up. She clenches her jaw as her mouth fills with saliva, but she’s okay. She’s okay. </p><p>“Fair,” Brigitte says, too low. Her throat feels tight.</p><p>“Would you care if we were?” he asks.</p><p>Brigitte’s heart is beating so hard and she doesn’t know if it’s because she’s freaking or if she’s actually going to throw up. She shuts her eyes again, shakes her head but it’s more<em> I don’t know</em>, or <em>I can’t do this</em>, than <em>no.</em></p><p>“Brigitte… You okay?”</p><p>She squeezes her eyes tighter. Her ears are ringing and this sick heat washes over her. She turns her face to the window, the cold air blowing in, and takes a couple deep breaths. She thinks he says her name again, but the wind is blasting into her ears too loud. “I’m okay,” she says. She’s broken into a cold sweat and the night air makes her shiver, but it makes her feel less nauseous, too. “Okay,” Sam says, but he doesn't sound convinced.</p><p>She pulls back from the window eventually, feeling shaky and weak. Her ears feel filled like she’s back underwater in the bathtub doing the death pictures. She can see Sam glancing at her anxiously from the corner of her eye, but she hides beneath her hair and shivers into her own arms wrapped around herself. Sam says “You’ll have to tell me which one is yours,” and, right, he doesn’t know; he’s never been to her neighbourhood, at least not with her. That feels so strange to her, suddenly. She knows the houses of several of her classmates, even the ones she’s never spoken to, because so many of them live on the same streets, in the same cul-de-sacs. She sees them around, sometimes, or sees them coming out their front doors in the mornings, when she and Ginger walk to school. She knows Sam better than most of them, and he doesn’t even know what her house looks like, he’s just driving through these identical streets on guesswork alone. </p><p>Or maybe Trina told him. They’ve spent their whole lives a handful of blocks away from one another. Brigitte spends her days avoiding the Sinclair’s house like the plague, but she still thinks she could find it blindfolded. That’s what growing up in the suburbs does to you.</p><p>She pulls herself up a little straighter and actually focuses on what’s outside her window. They’re in the wrong block, but she knows where she is, and she sort of hates that she doesn’t get lost in the maze of houses and streets. She hates that she can navigate this place, like it’s been bred into her, like she’s meant to be here, amidst identical houses and zombie-like neighbours. She thinks things always look a little stranger in the dark, but it only takes her a second to know how to get home. “Turn left here,” she says, and he does it. She wonders how lost she could make him, since Sam’s greenhouse is half out of the suburbs and surrounded by space and then woods. They’ll cut them down eventually and make more houses, but for now, the woods and the lookout point still exist the further you drive in that direction. Past the greenhouse, past the woods, past the lookout. Eventually she reasons, Bailey Downs ends, but sometimes she can’t even see how. Like she’ll set foot outside the imagined perimeters of this place and just find herself in it again. Like the signs that say <em>Thank You for Visiting</em> and <em>Welcome to Bailey Downs</em> are one and the same, creating some kind of terrible cosmic loop. ‘A safe and caring community.’ She wonders if that’s a predatory thought, that she could get him to the centre of this suburban maze and… then what? Is it a predatory thought or is it just her own weird mind? Sometimes she thinks stuff she’d rather not. She pushes the thought out of her head. “Um,” she says, “You should probably stop at the neighbours', my parents think I’m in bed. Turn right…” They turn into her cul-de-sac. Her house sits almost at the end of it. “Here’s good,” she tells him, and he stops, puts the van into park, awkwardly, one arm still in a sling. Brigitte thinks she should apologize but then she didn’t do it, Ginger did. Still, she’s the reason he’s hurt, she pulled him into all this.</p><p>She looks away, to the lit up windows of her house. “Is that the one?” Sam asks her, following her gaze.</p><p>“Yup…” She almost doesn’t want to go, but Ginger’s in there, and that’s always made it home.</p><p>Sam taps out this little rhythm on the steering wheel, eyes on her front yard. She feels trapped, self-conscious, like maybe he thought she lived somewhere else and was, therefore, a different kind of person. She doesn’t know how to get out, suddenly. What are you supposed to say when a guy drops you off? She thinks she should probably roll the window back up so that he doesn’t have to but she feels frozen, like any move could be the wrong one and she’ll look like an idiot. So she sits, frozen, and looks like an idiot in that way instead, but at least she's doing that already.</p><p>And then Sam says, “That’s an invasive species you know.”</p><p>She looks where he points, and makes a face. “The shrub?” It’s her dad’s — bought from a garden centre a few summers ago and surrounded by a bed of mulch, and carefully laid stones.</p><p>He shrugs. “They compete with native plants in the area. Throw off the eco-system.</p><p>She exhales relief, unfreezing because suddenly she remembers how this goes, who he is. Sam the tree-planter, the gardener, the person who told her he’d help her find a cure for her sister’s problem, and then did it. She thinks, maybe, he’s her friend. “I mean… you’re going to have to take that up with Henry,” she tells him.</p><p>“That your dad?”</p><p>She nods, then reaches out and rolls up her window. “Um, thanks,” she tells him.</p><p>“Yeah,” he answers, like it’s just a given.</p><p>She pushes her door open and gets out. Something about the still, night air feels terribly strange, but then she realizes that it’s because Norman’s not barking… Because—</p><p>“Hey,” Sam says, drawing her eyes back. “See you tomorrow, right?”</p><p>She has her fingers on the edge of the door to close it. “Yeah,” she tells him, and she wishes she could convey that she means it this time. She drops her eyes to her shoes. “You know, you don’t have to do this, either.” She knows she already told him, but she wants to reiterate.</p><p>“I want to.”</p><p>It’s a better response than last time, and Brigitte meets his eyes again, and hesitates because he’s hesitating. The air feels tight between them, like they’re sliding too close to some kind of precipice. It makes her lungs feel tight. “See you,” she says, quickly, and pushes the door shut. It only occurs to her later, as she slides after her coat through their open bedroom window to the cement floor below, that she probably should have said thank you instead.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>Alone in Sam’s room — Sam’s <em>place</em>, since it’s everything, really: the kitchen, the couch, the bathroom door off to the side, and the bed — it’s different from before. Before, all Trina had really been able to see was him. But now he’s left to drive that little Fitzbitch home like… like he knows her or something. He told her he’d be back in less than an hour, so she waits.</p><p>She thinks about leaving. Really, she does, but it’s not super easy for her to get out here without her parents wondering where she is. Normally, she would have brought Morely but…</p><p>She’s not going to cry, she won’t. Instead she takes a deep breath, straightens her spine and turns from the door to face the room. Her fingers fall onto the table where all the drug stuff is laid out. He was in the middle of it when she came over, and she used to think it was testament to how much he trusted her that he let her see the way he did this, and how much he had. Sometimes she still lets herself think that. He says someday pot will be legal and probably monitored by the government, creating a drop in quality and a bump in price. She doesn’t think so, but what does she know? She doesn’t like to do drugs, much. Every once in a while she’d smoke up with Sam — because just a little can’t hurt, right? But she wants to make sure she doesn’t mess up her lungs for running. And, he’s right, sex does feel better when you’re high. </p><p>Behind the drugs, there’s about a thousand books — most of them plant books, and a few are paperbacks that look like he found them at basements or yard sales, because they’re at least twenty years old, the spines cracked and pages yellow and brittle. Some of the books are weird, though. There’s an encyclopedia of magical herbs that isn’t a joke, or it doesn’t read like one. There’s the <em>Necronomicon</em> and an unreturned library book on cunning folk in America.</p><p>Sometimes Trina thinks she’d like to go to school in America because it seems so much cooler than just… here. She thinks about Syracuse and UCLA, but her parents say it’s not likely she’ll get a sports scholarship to an American school if she’s Canadian. She thinks maybe she’ll try anyway, but she doesn’t know how they’d ever afford the tuition. She’ll probably just end up going to UofT or University of Ottawa or something. If she’s lucky, she might get into UBC, and then she could live on the west coast, which is <em>basically</em> like California. </p><p>That’s what she tells herself, but it’s mostly a joke. It rains way too much to be like California.</p><p>She hears Sam’s truck pull into the drive a little while later and he lets himself in. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed with her flip phone, looking at pictures of Morely. He meets her eyes for a moment before he shuts the door, and he doesn’t come over. She’s quiet, flipping her phone shut and raising her eyebrows, waiting for him to speak. She came all the way over here, she waited for him, it’s the least he can do.</p><p>He finally says “Okay, Trina,” all soft, like he’s exhausted. She’s furious but she pushes it down, pulls her fingers through her hair to push it behind her ear where it doesn’t stay, anyway.</p><p>“How did you even meet her, anyway?”</p><p>Sam waves a hand like <em>whatever</em>. “She was looking for something specific,” he says, circling the room like a trapped half-wild creature, restless and afraid to come too close. She hates when he’s like this because it makes her feel like she’s the inconvenience.</p><p>“From you?” she asks, and it’s mean in her head, comes out mean on her tongue. But it works, and he meets her eyes and she thinks it’s worth it, even if he’s annoyed.</p><p>“From the <em>greenhouse</em>, Trina, come on.”</p><p>“‘Come on’, <em>what</em>?” she snaps, standing up. Sam stiffens, goes still, but he’s watching her now. At least he’s looking at her. “So she comes here once and suddenly you’re driving her home? Do you do that for all your customers? That’s <em>some customer servi—</em>”</p><p>“Jesus christ, Trina, I don’t have to explain myself to you. You and me? We’re not together, we’re not anything, and besides, I don’t fucking tell her about you or what you’re doing here either—”</p><p>“Because you could get in trouble! Because you’re ashamed of it—”</p><p>“Because you’re—” He stops, takes a breath, and when he speaks again, it’s his normal volume. “Look, we’ve talked about this, we’ve talked it to death. We’re done, Trina, we have to be. Okay?”</p><p>“So, what, we can’t even be friends?”</p><p>Sam looks at her. <em>Really</em> looks at her for a second and she can feel her heart beating so much faster than when she’s running. He swallows, and she thinks that maybe she’s going to win this. Because she knows he’s lonely. And she knows it doesn’t take much for Sam to give in or, it didn’t before. It surprised her, how easy it was. How quickly she could turn a fight into something else, if she just pretended she was going to leave, and then came back. It was mean, and it twisted something inside her that felt like she was hurting herself, somehow, too, but it worked almost every time. They could be shouting at each other, but if she just got her fingers on that door… sometimes she wouldn’t even have to pull it open before turning back. He’d never look at her, when she did that, but if she went to him he’d let himself press right into her arms.</p><p>It was her one secret weapon, because he could beat her in every argument. He was older, knew how the world worked, could twist logic in ways that she couldn’t grasp until later, when her blood cooled. Sam hated to be left, and she thought that, through that, she had him. Until he left her first. She wishes she could hate him for it. In the end, though, she kinda hates herself.</p><p>Sam says “Friends isn’t what you’re here for.”</p><p>“Oh, so you know what I’m here for.”</p><p>“Friends doesn’t work, Trina, we— you know how it goes.”</p><p>She does know. They fight or they fuck, and in between those two things, she feels like she’s struggling for common ground. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard. Sometimes she thinks she likes the fighting better than the sex, because at least he looks at her, then. It’s so fucking not fair. She turns back to the bed, grabs her phone and shoves it into her purse. “Yeah, it’s funny that you’re so totally willing to just drop this at the same time as you show up at field hockey practice to talk to them.”</p><p>“Who’s <em>them</em>?”</p><p>“The <em>Fitzgeralds</em>,” Trina says, “<em>Brigitte</em>. It’s not like you were freaking discreet.”</p><p>Sam just looks at her, as she zips her purse and pulls it over her shoulder as she straightens up. Just another way to be leaving. He scoffs, smiling, but his eyes are bitter. He looks away. “Whatever, man,” he says.</p><p>She’s got that stupid knot in her gut again, the one she got after he showed up for Fitz on the field hockey pitch. It’s the same as the way she feels about Jason’s little sisters when he doesn’t look out for them properly, like the way a big brother should. It burns inside her and she <em>hates</em> it, because she fucking hates Brigitte Fitzgerald but… “You know, you keep hanging around the high school, people are going to start talking.”</p><p>“Oh, you mean like you did?” Sam says.</p><p>She laughs this totally humourless “what?”</p><p>“<em>You’re</em> the one going around telling people I’m a cherry hound. Aren't you.”</p><p>She told him. That little bitch fucking told him. Trina was looking out for her, God knows why, and she went and fucking tattled like a preschooler. “What, I'm not wrong. Why don’t you have any friends, Sam, huh? Like why don’t you hang out with people your own age?”</p><p>Sam starts to say something, then bites his lip and turns away from her. He’s furious, and she feels it in a way she never has before. It pulses through her almost like fear. She’s never made him mad like this. Suddenly she’s crying and she doesn’t even know why. She doesn’t even know how it all connects in her head, but when she opens her mouth again, what spills out isn’t another insult, it’s “They fucking killed Morely, Sam,”</p><p>Sam turns back to her. “The fuck are you talking about?”</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“I know they did. They’re such <em>freaks</em>, he wouldn’t just have run away, they took him.”</p><p><em>Oh, shit</em>, he thinks, because somehow this never even occurred to him. <em>‘She’s killed a dog already, did you tell him that?’</em> But that was before Morely went missing. But still… still… she’s probably right, and he has to be so careful with this, because how much does Trina <em>really</em> know? “Dogs are going missing all over the place. You know that. It’s some… fucking animal or something—”</p><p>“I only left him alone for like <em>two</em> minutes. In the fenced yard, I mean— how could an animal do that?”</p><p>Sam shakes his head. “I dunno. Trina, I dunno.”</p><p>“I mean, the gate wasn’t even unlocked. He just didn’t come back. I called him, I looked for <em>hours</em>. It’s not fair.”</p><p>“It’s not your fault,” he says, and then immediately feels like it was the wrong thing, because she just breaks down. He thinks he makes out ‘I shouldn’t have left him,’ and fuck… <em>goddamn it</em>. He knows she loved that dog, he kind of did, too. Morely was sweet and ridiculous, and that’s why it was so fucking weird when he freaked out at Ginger that day at the school. Now Sam knows why. Jesus, fuck. He hopes whatever happened to that dog was done quick.</p><p>“Trina, I’ll take you home,” Sam says, softly, but he doesn’t go to her. He doesn’t want things to have a chance to go another way, not now when he hasn’t slipped yet. “C’mon, hey. We’ll just drive for a bit, if you want.” She nods and he thinks Trina never looks small until she’s upset. He would have hugged her, once, but he won’t now, because he doesn’t want to slip up, confuse her more. It wouldn’t be fair. He thinks, probably, it was never fair to her.</p><p>They can’t be friends, he thinks. And eventually she’ll realize how shitty this whole thing was. He wants her to find someone better than him, someone she can relate to, because she deserves that, at least. She deserves someone nicer than he is.</p><p>He gets her home by eleven, which is too late, but she’s got her phone, so her parents can reach her if they want to. She’s been quiet for a while which is unusual for her, but he just leaves it, even though he’s half-inclined to fill the silence where she usually does it.</p><p>“Tell the truth,” she says, at the beginning of her street. “What’re you doing with her?”</p><p>“Who?”</p><p>“Brigitte Fitzgerald.”</p><p>“It’s nothing. All right? Some information on a native plant. I told her I’d seed some for her, that’s it.”</p><p>“You like her. She’s smart like you are. Top of every class,” Trina says, rolling her eyes. “She’s such a fucking know-it-all.”</p><p>“No,” Sam says, simply, and just leaves it at that. Because he doesn’t like her. Not like Trina means. Or Ginger. He straight up told Brigitte how he felt — <em>I do not think of you that way.</em> That’s where they stand, they both know it. That’s it.</p><p>“She skipped a grade, you know,” Trina says as Sam stops at the end of her driveway. “I mean… she’s basically still in middle school.”</p><p>Sam shuts his eyes as his stomach twists unpleasantly. “Trina,” he says. “It’s not like that.”</p><p>“You swear? ‘Cause like…” the silence is heavy. It wavers between them like heat waves, almost as hot. Trina’s looking him dead in the eye and when she speaks again, it’s barely above a whisper “You can’t always just get your way. And I know her, she’s like… worlds away from where you are. And if you do anything to her, and I find out? I’ll tell. And you’ll be in deep shit.”</p><p>Sam can’t say anything. There’s too much in that. And he wants to ask her ‘Do you think I <em>did</em> something to you?’ Because when he first met her, when they first slept together, he didn’t know she was sixteen. He should have stopped when he found out, but he didn’t. He knows that makes him an asshole. Worse. He <em>knows</em> that, but Trina… no. Okay, no. This isn’t her fault. And jesus christ, he hopes he hasn’t… hurt her in some way worse than breaking up with her. </p><p>He says “Your parents are gonna start to worry.”</p><p>“I called my mom, she knows I’m with you.”</p><p>And that’s the other thing. He met her parents, knows them by name, sat at their dinner table. It’s not like this was some secret, illicit thing, but still he… it shouldn’t have happened. Trina’s smart, capable, mature for her age, and even if it fooled him at first, that’s not on her. Someone should have clocked that she was too young, sooner. He should have known her better before he slept with her. He doesn’t know who it’s on, but it’s probably him. He doesn’t know how to say any of that, though, and they’re parked in her drive with the engine idling. He looks away from her, and it feels trite to say it now, because she’s just threatened him, really. And she thinks he’s some sort of fucking predator, when that’s not how it went. He says it anyway though, because he fucking means it. “Yeah, I never meant to hurt you.”</p><p>“Oh, save it, Sam. I’m over it,” she says, and gets out. She closes the door hard, and she doesn’t look back.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Ginger promises to come with her to the greenhouse. Somehow it seems so much easier with Ginger there, even though it was the opposite, before. That was just a couple of days ago, Brigitte thinks. It seems so surreal, like a year has passed between now and then. All of the snow that fell the day they tried to go to the craft store has already melted, but it took the rich colours of autumn with it. Now everything is grey and drab, and Brigitte hates their suburb even more than usual. Still, she makes it through the school day — through the overpowering smell of living bodies and their Axe deodorant and sweat and blood and so much else. She leaves the period before last to go to the bathroom which is mercifully free of people and smells kind of just like water and damp paper towel and soap. How did Ginger do this? Brigitte feels like she can’t focus on anything at all. Her head is pounding with every beat of her heart until she feels nauseous. </p><p>She doesn’t know how long she stands there in the bathroom stall with her hands pressed over her eyes, just breathing, but the bell ringing makes her jump practically out of her skin, and she knows that there’s going to be a flock of girls in here any second. It’s like they can’t go more than a period without checking their hair and fixing their mascara. She slips out of the bathroom and into the milling crowd. Last period is with Ginger, at least. She’s mostly being swept along by other students, like the tide, when her sister finds her, grasps her arm, and Brigitte slows down. Suddenly there’s Ginger’s familiar smell — like henna and milk. Brigitte wants to just stop and turn into her, press her face into Ginger’s neck but that would be… they just don’t do that, here.</p><p>“Man,” Ginger says, “You look like shit.”</p><p>“That’s how I feel,” Brigitte says. Ginger doesn’t let her go until they reach their seats at the back of the room. Brigitte puts her head down on her desk, feels the vibrations through it as chairs scrape and bang and people chat all around her. Someone strokes her hair, once, and it’s Ginger — her long fingers circling the back of Brigitte’s neck through her hair. “Almost there, Bee,” she says, voice soft and only for her. Brigitte exhales, squeezing her eyes shut tight because she wants to cry. She is so, so tired. She doesn’t think she’s slept properly a single night since Ginger was bitten.</p><p>She’s half terrified, as they approach the greenhouse in the already-gathering dark of Ontario winters, that Sam will have gone back on his word, or he’ll have forgotten, but he’s there — mercifully alone this time — and he’s got everything laid out on the table — syringes, cotton, the little metal cup. The black pillar candle is already burning and something about Sam’s small room feels safe. Or maybe it’s just warm.</p><p>“I waited to make it,” he says. “Just, for your peace of mind.” That it would be the same as Ginger’s was. She sits down with him at the table, and Ginger leans in so close that her red hair falls over Brigitte's shoulder. She is a presence as familiar as her own shadow. “This shit,” Ginger says “smells awful.”</p><p>“Well, it’s poison,” Sam tells her as the mixture starts to bubble. “Only safe in small doses.”</p><p>“How do you know how much is safe for Bee?”</p><p>“I don’t.”</p><p>Ginger shifts her weight behind her and Brigitte takes a breath. “It’s only been a week,” Brigitte says, “Since Halloween. Less than.”</p><p>“How long was he infected? Jason,” Sam asks.</p><p>“I dunno,” Brigitte says. “Ginge…?”</p><p>“I’unno, like a week and a half? Maybe a little bit more.”</p><p>“That one was about three millilitres,” Sam says. “And he’s bigger than you.”</p><p>“How much was mine?” Ginger asks, more curious, Brigitte thinks, than she should be.</p><p>“More,” Sam says. Seven, maybe eight.”</p><p>“Yeah well… it worked, but it also fucking hurt. Like my veins had acid in them.”</p><p>“Great, Ginge, thanks,” Brigitte says. Like she’s not already freaked enough.</p><p>“What if it’s too soon?” Ginger says. “Like in a couple more days, she’ll be where Jase was.”</p><p>“In a couple more days, both of you killed a dog,” Brigitte says. “I want to try it now.”</p><p>She looks up at Ginger, then at Sam. </p><p>“We’re gonna do one and a half,” Sam says, “and then—” he adds, cutting her off before she can protest “We can do more if it doesn’t work. At best it’s a cure, and at worst it’ll probably stave it off for a couple more days. No dog killing involved. Okay?”</p><p>Brigitte hesitates. What if it hurts too much to take more? What if it doesn’t work and then a second dose is somehow... “What about immunity," she asks. "Like the virus learns how to beat the cure and then it’s just ineffective?”</p><p>“It takes a long time to build those up, Brigitte, you won’t get it in one dose.”</p><p>She meets his eyes, holds them, then looks away. “Okay,” she says. </p><p>“Okay. You ready?”</p><p>“Let me do it,” Ginger says, suddenly. She reaches for the syringe Sam’s just filled up.</p><p>“You know how to do this?” Sam asks her. He doesn’t hand it over yet.</p><p>Ginger says “She’s <em>my</em> sister.”</p><p>Sam hands the needle over, and as she takes it, he says “At least let me walk you through it.”</p><p>They trade places, Ginger taking Sam’s chair in front of Brigitte who rolls up her sleeve. She makes a fist a couple times to get a vein. </p><p>“Flick it downwards,” Sam tells her. “Get the air out.” Ginger does as she’s told, and Sam reaches out. Ginger glares at him. “See the air bubble at the top?” he says, without touching the syringe, but he’s holding her gaze right back. Brigitte feels something unfurl slow and heavy in her stomach, like oil and she swallows. “Press the stopper, until it’s gone.” Some of the purple liquid spills to the floor. “Okay. Hey,” he says, and Brigitte looks up. “Ready?” She nods. “So,” Sam says, “inject into the vein at an angle, just under the skin. Good, and inject it slowly.”</p><p>Ginger does, and at first Brigitte doesn’t feel anything, until suddenly she does. It feels like Ginger’s pushed a live wire into her blood. It sparks inside her with every pump of her heart. She gasps sharply and tries to pull back, instinctively, but Sam grabs her shoulder, her wrist, and it’s so fast she doesn’t even register the heat of his hands before her vision goes white. Sam says “Pull it out,” from somewhere far away, and then the touch is gone. It’s just pain left. She can taste it in the back of her throat, sharp like poison, and someone else’s hands on on her, but they’re cool, and familiar — Ginger’s. They’re on her face and Ginger’s saying “Bee? <em>Bee!</em>” and things slowly start to come back into focus. Brigitte gags and then leans over the chair to cough wetly, but nothing comes up, it’s just the taste of that plant. Her heart’s beating way too hard, too fast. She presses one hand to her chest and rubs at the hurt behind her ribcage.</p><p>“It’s okay,” Ginger says. “It hurts, I know. It’s over fast—”</p><p>~</p><p>She’s right, the pain does fade, and Brigitte is left feeling strangely wooden in her own body. Not that she’s ever felt particularly comfortable in it.</p><p>“Think it worked?” Sam asks, from somewhere else. She blinks and looks up, and realizes that time’s passed. Ginger’s still sitting with her, but Sam’s near the kitchen. Ginger looks back as Brigitte shifts, meets her eyes.</p><p>“Bee?” Ginger prompts.</p><p>Brigitte takes a breath to steady herself and realizes that that overwhelming sense of smell is gone. It just smells like the greenhouse used to. Like the greenhouse does.</p><p>“Think so,” she says.</p><p>Sam offers her water, and then offers to drive them home. It’s a no on both counts because she feels like she’s been enough of an inconvenience to him already. The fresh air, the cold — all of it makes her feel better, a little more clear-headed. She feels right again. Like the world’s just the right level of overwhelming — the one she’s used to, and not the one that was threatening to consume her entirely, but then didn’t.</p><p>There’s a part of her that warns that it can’t be that easy. She feels like they both narrowly escaped something that could have been a thousand times worse, but she doesn’t feel in the clear, either.</p><p>She feels more like she’s standing in the middle of a dead field, waiting for a storm.</p><p>~</p><p>“Feels like your ears are stuffed with cotton, right?” Ginger asks her later, both of them sitting on the couch in the rec room, almost huddled together. The TV is on, muted, and flashing softly over them. Besides the candle burning on the TV table at Ginger’s elbow, it’s the only light in the room.</p><p>“Kind of.”</p><p>“You’ll get used to it. It’s just what human hearing sounds like. Kinda sucks, huh?”</p><p>“It was the smell— like everything was just so overpowering.”</p><p>Ginger’s quiet and then, softly says “Felt like I couldn’t taste anything but blood. Like everything was just… texture and smell… y’know?”</p><p>Brigitte doesn’t, but she exhales and turns her face into Ginger’s shoulder. “What if it didn’t work all the way?”</p><p>“It worked,” Ginger tells her, and she pulls the blanket around their legs up around Brigitte’s shoulders.</p><p>~</p><p>The small dark hairs in the cuts on her arms fall out in the shower the next morning. Brigitte can just wipe them away, like fallen eyelashes. There’s no more blood in the toilet and obviously she’s more relieved than disappointed, but for a second — that first morning when she’d seen that red in the water — just for a second she’d felt like, finally, she and Ginger were the same again.</p><p>~</p><p>
<strong>GINGER</strong></p><p>Ginger’s tail falls off like an umbilical cord one morning, like she’s been birthed again as a normal human girl. She sits up in her bed, too early for even Bee to be awake, and cradles it in her hands and feels unreasonably sorry for it, like it’s a pet she forgot about, neglected until it died. She doesn’t know what to do with it. Throwing it away feels disrespectful somehow, and so eventually she pulls on some clothes and buries it beneath the floorboards of the playhouse in the back garden. She wants to cry, but she doesn’t. Even though what it represents was terrible, it still feels like a loss. Even though she’s been cured, she doesn’t really feel like she’s regained herself. She feels like she lost something, when the wolf left her. Something vital, only she doesn't know what.</p><p>She goes back inside and washes the dirt from her hands into the kitchen sink, and then makes coffee because she doesn’t want to go back downstairs to their bedroom. She needs something, desperately, to change. Henry comes downstairs first, getting ready for work and seems surprised to spot her leaning against the kitchen island with her cup. For a moment, neither of them speak, but then Ginger points to the coffee machine and says “There’s coffee,” and realizes she can’t remember the last time she actually spoke to him outside of the dinner table.</p><p>Henry doesn’t, either, it seems, but he says “Thank you,” still in that surprised tone like she’s just told him something he can't actually believe. Like he doesn’t have to pay off the mortgage anymore, or something. They carefully avoid one another as he gets a cup. He’s got the newspaper from outside and he touches it idly as he drinks, but doesn’t open it — like maybe he feels like he should do something, here, instead. </p><p>Ginger wonders if her parents have always been like this — half-afraid of her. Somehow she's never really thought of them as people, but here’s her own father, as fidgety and uncomfortable as some of the guys from school because he has no idea what to do around her, and maybe that’s fair. She’s coming up empty-handed, too. </p><p>“Is your sister still feeling sick?” He finally asks.</p><p>“She was better last night,” she says, and she is struck, suddenly, by an idea. “I should go get her up for school,” she says, and slips out of the kitchen and back downstairs. She doesn’t even hesitate before she climbs into Brigitte’s bed, curling up against her back. “Bee,” she says, and Brigitte twists onto her back, sleepily, to face her. “Let’s go on an adventure.”</p><p>It’s usually not very hard to convince Bee to skip school, and it’s usually not very hard to get away with it, either. Bailey Downs High School doesn’t call home if someone doesn’t show up. It’s “a safe and caring community”, that’s what all the signs say. So what if there’s a bloodthirsty, rampaging beast lurking on the fringes of the suburbs? No big deal, right? Apparently there’s been great success in ignoring the thing until it goes away. Ginger just wishes that they’d all collectively ignored it a little bit harder. Like maybe got rid of it, or took more precautions <em>before</em> she got attacked on that playground. Because now she’s got these scars on her shoulder and her side, and on the inside of her right thigh that are never, she thinks, going to go away. They healed fast, sure, but they didn’t disappear. When she looks in the mirror now, she feels like a poorly-sewn ragdoll, like someone made her in a rush and then tossed her aside when she wasn’t good enough.</p><p>She and Brigitte get ready and then walk the usual route in the direction of school. It’s just a matter of veering left a block or two before the building comes into view and they’re scot-free. The bus takes them into “town” which is really just a collection of strip malls stretched across a vast expanse of parking lots and two sets of four-lane traffic. But there’s some interesting things. There’s the park that’s usually abandoned on weekdays and the train tracks beside the river and the bookstore. Ginger usually tries to keep Bee away from there for as long as possible, or they waste the day. They have to be home by four, because that’s around when they usually get home. Can’t have Pammy knowing that they’re not where they’re supposed to be.</p><p>And it’s fucking ironic because where they’re supposed to be, school, has never felt as safe as this expanse of concrete and parched grass and Bee beside her. What’s the point of all this stress and uncertainty, she wonders. How the hell is she supposed to go back to school now, when she doesn’t even know who the fuck she’s supposed to be there anymore. Will she show up dressed for Jason and his crew, or will they make fun of her if she does? If she comes back swathed in layers of lace and wool, will she destroy any chance she has of being somebody in that place? It was easier when people didn’t know what to do with her.</p><p>It’s going to rain, and the air feels damp and heavy. Still, they hang over the railing of the bridge and try to spit onto the metal lines of the train tracks below. Brigitte hits them first, probably for the first time ever and Ginger shoves her in unmediated delight crowing “What the <em>fuck</em>, Bee!?” and she wonders how she can be so overjoyed and so terrified of every little thing that changes about Brigitte. Like maybe this will be the moment Brigitte realizes she doesn’t need her — or this, or this. Anyway, she gets this smile now, on the bridge, in the greyest of November days, and it’s a smile that Brigitte has always, still, reserved only for her. Unguarded but always a little unsteady, too. Ginger’s got this overwhelming love for her that makes her throat close up and her nose sting, and she wraps her arms around Brigitte’s shoulders and hugs her tight so that she can’t see the tears in Ginger’s eyes.</p><p>They rock a little, Ginger rocks them, twists them on the bridge, shifting their weight together so that Brigitte’s hands come up to hold onto the back of her jacket for balance. She says “Ah— Ginge, that hurts,” and yeah, she’s squeezing her so, so tight, but she doesn’t know what else to do with this kind of love.</p><p>She lets her go and Brigitte kind of gasps — fills her lungs like she couldn’t a moment ago, but then her fingers touch Ginger’s just for a moment. They’re cold and narrow, but sure in that little catch of their half-entwined fingertips. Ginger says “You want to go to that stupid bookstore, don’t you?” And so that’s where they end up. They stop for something hot first, and neither of them have enough money for food even though it’s past lunch, but they buy a coffee and a hot chocolate, and then open everything up between them on a damp wooden bench out front to mix them into one drink because the people at the shops never make it right. They toss the dregs of the coffee and share the coffee-hot chocolate as Ginger does half-bored laps around the bookstore, always coming to find Brigitte again and again. It’s alway a surprise when she’s not where Ginger found her last. Then she has to prowl the shop, flashing past row after row of books, sparing just a glance for each of them until she finds her again — usually sitting on the floor in a pool of skirt and her bag and the books she’s collected, hidden beneath her hair. Sometimes, if the volumes are thin enough, and the shop is more of a big chain store than a bookstore, Ginger will steal one for her because there’s something delightful about the way Brigitte’s eyes go wide when Ginger pulls it out, like a magic trick, three streets away, or back at home, or on the bus. The way she hisses “<em>Ginger</em>, no,” but always keeps it anyway.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>“Why’re you acting like such a fucking baby?”</p><p>It’s Sunday, after dinner, and the reality of high school on Monday morning looms on the horizon. Ginger, who was fine moments ago, is inexplicably furious that Brigitte’s not going to skip with her again.</p><p>“I have a test,” Brigitte explains, for what feels like the tenth time.</p><p>“Well, so? So what, it’s not like it’s even going to matter.”</p><p>And Brigitte doesn’t know whether that’s because the Death Pact is still on, or because they can agree that high school is a pile of horse shit, but that gives her pause. She bites her lip and then, for once, says what she’s thinking, which is: “Well, it matters to me.”</p><p>“Oh my god. You’re such a fucking keener.”</p><p>Brigitte rolls her eyes.</p><p>“High school English isn’t going to matter two years from now, fucking Shakespeare’s not going to matter.”</p><p>“It’s Chem,” Brigitte says, under her breath.</p><p>Ginger rounds back on her and for a second Brigitte’s back to their bedroom on Halloween. They’ve switched places, and Ginger’s eyes are green and her fingernails have almost healed past the places they’ve split. She’s human, but she still scares her, not because Brigitte thinks she’ll hurt her, but because she’s afraid to be in a fight, she’s afraid to be without her at school all over again. “What?” Ginger asks.</p><p>Brigitte swallows. Her throat is dry and she has to clear it a little. “I said, it’s Chemistry. Not—”</p><p>“Oh, who fucking cares?”</p><p><em>I do</em>, Brigitte thinks. But there’s something else Ginger said that she’s holding onto. <em>It isn’t going to matter two years from now.</em> Brigitte turns sixteen next September, but that’s only a year away. So maybe that means Out by sixteen is out altogether. Like they’re not going to do it anymore. Brigitte’s fingers twist at her side, but that bolsters her. She isn’t about to ask about it right now, but it sits like hope in her chest.</p><p>“Why are you so scared to go back?” Brigitte asks. It’s because she’s not thinking about it completely, not so focused on the repercussions of that sentence that she can get it out at all, and Ginger looks at her, surprised.</p><p>There’s a pause between them, and Brigitte watches Ginger’s walls crumble down, watches her sit down on the edge of her bed, and when she looks up, she’s just Ginge — and more vulnerable than Brigitte would like. “Because I dunno who to <em>be</em>, Bee.”</p><p>She furrows her brow. “Just be you.”</p><p>Ginger’s quiet, looking down to pick at a hair that’s ingrown on the side of her knee. Her red hair falls forward, hiding her face from Brigitte, but only partially. There’s still streaks in it, impossibly white. She says “I don’t know if I want to be me anymore,” and Brigitte’s stomach flips over nastily. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She wants to say <em>I want you to be you</em>, but that’s not always true, either.</p><p>It used to be.</p><p>“Whatever, fine, we’ll do it your way,” Ginger says, getting up so suddenly Brigitte has to take a step back between the beds. Ginger shuts herself into the bathroom and leaves Brigitte standing in the middle of their room feeling like she did something wrong, like she started this fight, when all she did was say she had to go to class. She didn’t even say Ginger had to go, too, but of course it was implied. They always do everything together, or they used to, before lately.</p><p>The scariest thing is that Brigitte doesn’t know if she can blame all of it on the wolf.</p><p>Ginger’s in the bathroom for a long time, and Brigitte doesn’t hear the water running for the bath. She doesn’t hear anything at all. She thinks of the razors in there (Out by sixteen or…) and the bottles of bleach and cleaner (dead in this scene but…)</p><p>Breath stolen from her lungs, Brigitte rushes to the bathroom and wrenches open the door. She sees the scissors in Ginger’s hand first, and there’s this fear pulsing through her so hard she can feel her heartbeat in her fucking fingertips. This ribbon of red slides down Ginger’s arm in the hard, fluorescent buzz, but it’s strands of her hair. Brigitte registers what she’s seeing. There’s long strands of Ginger’s hair — the white hair, scattered all over the counter and the floor. There’s a mess of it in the sink, shocks of red running through it where Ginger’s accidentally cut the rest.</p><p>Ginger’s breathing like crying, but she isn’t, yet. She’s got a fistful of her hair, red and white together and she says “I don’t want it, I don’t want to look at it.”</p><p>“Ginge,” Brigitte says, and she doesn’t even remember crossing the room, only that she’s got the scissors in her hand, tugging them from Ginger’s fingers. Brigitte’s body’s still reacting like this is a panic situation. She looks at Ginger with wide eyes and Ginger looks back then says “Maybe I should shave my head.”</p><p>Brigitte flexes her fingers around the scissors and looks at their reflection in the mirror. They meet each other’s eyes there. She asks “Do you want to?”</p><p>“I’unno… it could be really <em>Jane Doe</em>,” Ginger says, deadpan. </p><p>"<em>G.I. Jane</em>," Brigitte corrects. She pulls a face. She likes Ginger’s hair, wishes it were hers, bright and soft and easily managed. Everything hers isn’t. Only she wouldn’t want red, because then people would look at her. She doesn’t tell her what she should do, only says “I could get Henry’s electric razor from upstairs.”</p><p>Ginger doesn’t answer her, not really. What she does say is “It’s gone. The… tail. I buried it in the playhouse.” Brigitte doesn’t know how to respond. After a second Ginger take a deep, steadying breath and pulls her hair back into a fist, drawing it out of her face and Brigitte thinks she looks sharper and smaller without it hanging around her shoulders. She’s heartbreakingly beautiful, even with the white lacing the red at her temple, above her right eyebrow, and tangled all throughout the fall of it down the back of her neck. </p><p>Brigitte says “Want me to help you cut it out?” and Ginger lets her hair fall back around her shoulders again and says “Okay.”</p><p>So the fight’s over. Brigitte sits on the sink counter, her knees on either side of Ginger’s waist, because it’s the only place in the bathroom with good light, and she painstakingly cuts away at each white piece of hair, combs through all that red to get all of them, like they’re cutting away the last of this thing. She knows it’s only a matter of time until the next one, and she finds herself thinking what she always does, thinking of how she can stop these fights from happening in the first place, thinking <em>I’ll be better next time.</em></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. shift</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>School’s okay. In fact, it’s almost <em>fine</em>, with Ginger at her side again. They’re not together in every class, but almost. It’s enough, and it’s a hell of a lot better than last month, when Brigitte had felt completely adrift each time the bell rang and Ginger — who had been missing all of the period before — had left her chair empty this period, too.</p><p>This feels more normal, Brigitte thinks, but by lunch she can’t pretend that it <em>is</em> normal anymore. Ginger’s been quiet and self-conscious; she’s wearing those high boots, wrapped in her coat all day like she’s protecting herself from something, but Brigitte notices the furtive glances she throws at people nearby. She notices the way Ginger straightens her back and carefully ignores anyone who might be looking. The way she’s posturing with her cigarette around the side of the school at lunch hour. Brigitte knows what she’s doing and thinks it’s halfway ridiculous, but she doesn’t say anything. She thinks Ginger’s beautiful always, but particularly when she’s not trying to be. She doesn’t say anything. Just scratches the thin skin beneath her eye and hunches her shoulders against the cold and wonders when her turn with this cigarette is going to be.</p><p>There’s the sound of the push bar on the side door as it opens, and Brigitte doesn’t expect it to be anyone they know so she doesn’t turn until something in Ginger’s face kind of lights up. She’s looking over Brigitte’s shoulder though, and when Brigitte turns, Jason McCardy’s way too close. She takes a step back, almost into Ginger. The cigarette comes dangerously close to her cheek as Ginger’s lowers it. The stream of smoke she exhales floats past Brigitte’s hair and Jason, for the first time in Brigitte’s memory, looks kind of lost.</p><p>He looks between them like he’s waiting to see if Ginge is pissed, if she even knows, that he cornered Brigitte in the supply closet just a few days ago. She doesn’t, because Brigitte had almost forgotten, but now she remembers in a more visceral way. It’s in the way her heart’s pounding and her hands get sweaty. She knows that both was and wasn’t really him, in the same way it was and wasn’t really Ginger, back in October. No one speaks, until Jason breaks first.</p><p>“Hey,” he says, his eyes on Ginger. The game plan with him, as usual, seems to be to pretend that Brigitte just doesn’t exist at all. He’s only got eyes for Ginger, suddenly, and Brigitte maintains her place between them, even though she doesn’t have to. Even though Ginger’s so close to her back that she feels the toe of her sister’s boot against the heel of her own. The open line of Ginger’s coat rest softly against Brigitte’s spine.</p><p>“Listen,” he says, “Can we talk?”</p><p>Ginger waves a hand, vaguely. “Last I checked.”</p><p>“No, I mean… in private.”</p><p>“Why?” Ginger asks, voice low, voice almost like Brigitte’s.</p><p>“I got some questions,” Jason says, and it’s not a threat. Not like it was in the supply closet, and Brigitte wonders if it’s only because he’s been cured that it’s different now, or if it’s the fact that it’s Ginger, and not her he’s dealing with. Brigitte knows that behind her and Ginger is just open space to the school field. She doesn’t feel trapped but she feels <em>angry</em>. She presses her teeth together and just rides it out. “And I think you’re the only one who can help. Don’t worry,” he says, softer. “I didn’t say anything. I won’t.”</p><p>“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Ginger says, soft.</p><p>“About—” for a second Jason looks lost, desperate, frightened. “Please, Ginger, just five <em>minutes</em>. And then if you don’t want to talk to me again, that’s fine, but…”</p><p><em>Don’t</em>, Brigitte pleads with Ginger in her head. <em>Please don’t, don’t, don’t…</em></p><p>“Fine,” Ginger says. “When?”</p><p>Jason glances at Brigitte and she gets it before he says anything. She’s the only thing standing in the way of them talking about it right now. She glowers at him. “My car’s here,” Jason says. “We could hang.”</p><p>Ginger throws the cigarette to the ground, about two thirds finished. Brigitte looks at it, exasperated, because she didn’t get any of it, and before she knows it, Ginger’s disappeared from her back. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her, over her shoulder. She leads the way to the parking lot with Jason in tow, leaving Brigitte all alone on the cracked pavement. </p><p>Brigitte wraps her arms around herself, leaning back against the brick. Maybe Ginge will just tell him to go fuck himself and come back and they can laugh about it. But she doesn’t. Five minutes go past, then ten. Lunch is over soon, and Brigitte gets this sick twist in her gut when she thinks about Ginger not showing up for next period. Like before.</p><p>Vaguely she registers a sound, a repetitive low grinding that she places — as she shakes herself out of her thoughts — as a chainsaw. </p><p>Brigitte creeps around the corner of the school to the front. Some people are milling around there, but not as many as around back where the field is. Mostly they’re kids with a free period and no car, debating on where they can go in time to get back in time for the bus home. Brigitte looks past them to the far end where — standing amongst fallen shrubbery, almost blending into the grey weather in his faded blue coat — is Sam.</p><p>He’s lost in whatever he’s doing, chainsaw hanging at his side, quiet now, the other hand raised to the back of his neck as he contemplates the branches at his feet. He’s working, and she shouldn’t bother him, but she could, she thinks, at least tell him that the cure definitely worked on her, too — or it seems to have, and say thanks and… and, maybe, if it feels okay, ask him if he’d be willing to offer her a cigarette.</p><p>All of that seems perfectly logical. It <em>is</em> perfectly logical, she reminds herself, as she steps forward without letting herself think too hard. She kind of stomps across the dead grass because it’s one of those moments that if she doesn’t just do it quick, like a band-aid, she won’t do it at all. </p><p>She opens her mouth to say something when he looks up, wary at first, but then it fades into soft surprise. “Oh, hey,” he says. “What’s up?”</p><p>“Hey,” she says, but doesn’t answer. <em>Nothing’s up, I’m boring.</em> She’s here for him. “I…” she glances over her shoulder but no one’s paying them any attention, and they’re far enough away not to be overheard. “I just um… wanted to tell you—” It’s all coming out wrong already. She ducks her head. “I mean you helped, so… And it’s… I don’t think I could’ve, um, without you so… because it worked,” she adds quickly, because, she realizes, he probably has no clue what she’s talking about. “Um, so... I mean, the cure worked. Again.” She winces a little at the ground.</p><p>“Yeah?” he asks her, “Where’s Ginger?” </p><p>It’s not a challenge, it’s genuinely curious and she looks up at him before she makes a face, kind of shrugs one shoulder. “With Jason McCardy.”</p><p>“You guys gonna start a club?” Sam asks. “Lycanthropy Anonymous?”</p><p>She gives him a look.</p><p>“Sorry,” Sam says. “Not funny.” </p><p>He’s not looking at her, and then he is, and she lets herself look back just for a second. “Um,” she begins, and wonders where the fuck her vocabulary has gone. “I guess that’s all, I just… thought you should know.”</p><p>“Yeah, well thanks,” Sam says in this way that she can’t read. </p><p>“You’re working,” Brigitte tells him, like he doesn’t already know. But she’s giving him an out. She’s trying to give herself one, too.</p><p>“Just about finished,” he tells her. “Winter’s the slow season, so. You know, it’s quiet. Especially now that you don’t come around anymore.”</p><p>She doesn’t know how to read that, or how it was said. She doesn’t know if he likes the quiet or not and it’s probably all over her face because she didn’t think to hide it. Because he doubles back, edits himself. “If you’re ever bored, I mean…”</p><p>“Oh—” she says. It starts off as ‘okay’ but the word doesn’t exactly vocalize totally. The bell rings and Brigitte feels her shoulders tighten as the real world crashes in and she remembers where she is. Suddenly she can hear other kids, laughing and shouting to their friends. She can feel how cold it is and the anxiety knotting her stomach over class without Ginger, and Ginger with Jason in his car and… her breath tumbles free from her lungs in bits and pieces like those games where the marble is falling through a collection of obstacles, getting caught on everything on the way down. She says “Do you have a cigarette?” and hears her own voice from far away through her anxiety.</p><p>“Sure.” Sam seems to shake out of his stillness as if from stone as he fishes out his cigarette pack. He half-hesitates, and then: “Do you want to sit in the truck? The heat works.”</p><p>~</p><p>Sam cranks the heat in the van and he gives her a cigarette from the pack, then takes one for himself. She digs out her zippo lighter and Sam finds a pocket bic, orange, and they light up separately. He cracks his window a little to let some of the smoke out.</p><p>“So, are you on a free, now or something?”</p><p>“History. I’m skipping.”</p><p>He breathes a laugh, exhaling smoke as he glances up at the school. “Yeah, huh?” And she doesn’t really know what to do with that so she doesn’t say anything, just smokes and stares at the school without really seeing it, thinking that Ginger’s either still with Jason, or in class wondering where the fuck <em>she</em> is. Half of her wants to go in to check if Ginger’s at her desk, to find her sister to make sure they’re not going to end up in a fight again, because she doesn’t know how to be around this Ginger, or what’s expected of her. She does know that if she sets foot in that school now after the bell’s rung, she probably won’t be able to get out again without being sent back to guidance or the principal’s office. She knows permanent records are bullshit, but she doesn’t want Pamela called regardless.</p><p>And then Sam says “Hey. You okay?” </p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>She looks over at him like she’s startled, like she doesn’t know how to answer. She’s always so goddamn intense, and he feels his skin prickle a little beneath that gaze, but then it’s gone, replaced by something else because she opens her mouth to answer and then doesn’t. She drops his eyes and swallows and says “Yeah,” and it’s the most unconvincing ‘yeah’ he thinks he’s ever heard, and normally he wouldn’t push it. Normally he’d just think <em>Fine, she doesn’t want to talk</em>, but this… he sometimes wonders if anyone ever checks in on Brigitte.</p><p>“Outside of the lycanthrope stuff, I mean,” he ventures, halfway too quiet, and he watches her lower her cigarette to her lap, pick at one of her nails in this tangle of smoke and thin, narrow fingers. She doesn’t say anything for a long time, but there’s this tension so he waits it out, keeps very still like she’s a wild creature he’s trying not to spook.</p><p>She sighs and then says, “It’s just… things have been really weird for a while now. I dunno…”</p><p>“Like weird how?” </p><p>She actually smiles, but it’s sardonic. Still, he gets the quirk of one side of her mouth, and a glance in his direction. Christ, her eyes look so green in this light. “Like you care,” she says, and it’s less biting than it should have been.</p><p>“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t,” he says, and flicks ash out the window, an excuse to look away from her, and they fall into that impossibly loud silence again, but he waits for her. Keeps himself still, doesn’t let himself tap the steering wheel in a rhythm, doesn’t do anything but smoke and tap the ash off. He can’t even look at her except in his peripheral. She’s so still that the smoke from her cigarette is rising in an almost straight line, until the breeze from his cracked window whisks it away into nothingness. </p><p>Finally, her voice so low it breaks into these little shards of almost-silence: “Just. Things aren’t the same as they used to be, between Ginger and me.”</p><p><em>Fuck</em>, he thinks, because he has no idea what to do about this. What does he know about sisters? “Just give it some time,” he says. “It’s been… you know, last month was—” But Brigitte shakes her head, once. </p><p>“It was before then, too,” she says. “Like sometimes she seems like she’s just… Like she wants to be somewhere else.”</p><p>“Somewhere without you, you mean?”</p><p>Brigitte shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe.”</p><p>“I mean…” Fuck, what’s he supposed to say? “It’s not the end of the world right?” Well. Probably not that. She twitches or shakes her head again, he’s not sure. It’s a tiny movement, and he can’t see her expression through her hair, not when she’s in profile to him like this. </p><p>She says “You don’t get it.”</p><p>She’s not wrong.</p><p>“Yeah. No, you’re right, I’m sorry…” She’s looking at the school so he follows her gaze. “So what happens if she goes back to class now and you’re not there?”</p><p>“I dunno, I’ve never skipped without her before.”</p><p>And he can’t really read her from that, so he doesn’t say anything. He’s thinking, though, that maybe this isn’t exactly healthy, what her and Ginger have. He’s been thinking it for a while, but it’s not fair to slap a label like ‘bad’ onto a girl who’s just been bitten by a lycanthrope. So he tries to think what else he can do, finishing his cigarette and putting it out before he taps something vaguely rhythmic on the wheel. “I’d offer to go for a drive, but I’ve got all these branches to clean up out here,” he says. And she looks at him with this expression of pure shock like he’s just asked her to prom or something. Honestly, it’s like he’s proposed marriage she looks so panicked, but it’s only for a second, less than that, and then she’s looking away and he can’t really see her face anyway through her hair.</p><p>“No, that’s okay, I just…” she drops her eyes to her cigarette and goes still and, jesus, Sam wishes he knew what was going on inside her head. </p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>“I just… I wanted you to know that it helped, all your research, and the cure, I just…” <em>Say ‘thank you,’</em> she thinks, but it’s so hard, and she doesn’t know why. Because maybe, according to Pamela, she owes him then, and all she’s been doing is asking for more. So instead of thank you she adds, “And I thought you’d probably have a smoke, so…” She can barely hear herself by the end of the sentence, and she half-doubts Sam will be able to. She kind of expects him to be pissed and he shifts and she can’t even look at him because she doesn’t know what to expect from that movement in her periphery. But then he holds out a hand, three cigarettes held gently in the circle of his fingers like drawing sticks. “Give a couple to Ginger, if you want. Or keep them all, it’s up to you.”</p><p>“That’s okay, we’ve got some, she just— she has the pack right now.” </p><p>He doesn’t move and she finally looks up at him, her brow wrinkled. She never knows exactly what to do with Sam — doesn’t know if he’s being nice or trying to get something out of her. Why would he offer so much if she’s not willing to give him anything back? That's what (Say ‘thank you’ she thinks again.) He gives in first and shrugs a shoulder, drawing his hand away. As he rescinds the offer she can feel her shoulders relax. He tells her “Suit yourself,” and glances in the rearview at all the wood he’s got to gather up. </p><p>She’s taking up his time. “You should go,” she says. “Sorry for interrupting.”</p><p><em>Sorry sorry sorry.</em> Sorry comes easy...</p><p>“Where are you gonna go?”</p><p>Brigitte’s fingers are on the door handle but she hasn’t popped it. She looks from him, up to the school. “I dunno… the library or something. I have another period after this, anyway.”</p><p>“Right, okay,” he says, and she’s starting to realize that this is how he talks when he guarded. The less he sounds like it matters, the more it does. He sounds like he doesn’t care, now and suddenly she feels bad. Maybe she shouldn’t have come over. It’s easier to talk to him at the greenhouse. She should have just waited. </p><p>“Or I could help you,” she says, meaning the wood. And he smiles at her, all genuine and half-startled and she feels her stomach flip over.</p><p>“That’s okay. You probably shouldn’t be hanging around me at all,” he says, “You know… people might get the wrong impression.” </p><p>And she wants to ask him: ‘What impression is that?’ but of course she doesn’t. She thinks she knows, anyway. It’s all the stuff they thought about Trina and him, before Ginger was bitten. </p><p>“People are gonna say shit about me, anyway,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“Yeah, but other people are paying me to be here to work, and they’re not going to like me keeping you from class.”</p><p><em>Teachers</em> he means, and Brigitte’s struck, suddenly, that this isn’t the same as Ginger going to sit in Jason’s car at lunch. Because Sam doesn’t go here, isn’t a student. She feels stupid, suddenly, for not putting two and two together — what this looks like. Sam’s around the school so much she forgets, sometimes, that he isn’t a fixture of this place. That he isn’t supposed to be here in the same way she is, or Ginger, or Jason McCardy. He’s just around. He works here, sells here… he…</p><p><em>He’s a cherry hound.</em> Trina’s voice in her head again. But here’s Sam telling her that they should both go back to their own places — the places where they don’t interact at school. She wonders when she forgot that they shouldn’t. It was after that day at field hockey where he’d come to her with an idea and she’s sent him off because she was in <em>class</em>, and people could see them. People would talk.</p><p>She has a thousand questions and not a clue how to go about asking any of them, but despite what they say — Trina, Pamela — it’s hard for her to think Sam’s got bad intentions. Harder still when she’s with him. She wonders if it’s supposed to feel like that. Maybe that’s part of it — part of how guys get into your pants, not that she’d ever fall for it, she thinks. She wouldn’t. Right? But lately she’s been feeling like a lot of people know things intrinsically that she doesn’t. Like Ginger. Like when did Ginger just learn all this stuff? It’s not unlike her to just spout strong feelings and opinions like facts, but lately it’s seemed more and more like Ginger actually knows what she’s talking about.</p><p><em>Except when it comes to Sam</em>, Brigitte thinks, and that feels like her most dangerous thought, yet. So yeah, he’s right. She probably shouldn’t be hanging around him at school, but he shouldn’t be hanging around her, either. “Why’d you let me into your truck, then?” she asks and Sam breathes that laugh he does — that one where he kind of shakes his head, where he doesn’t look at her. </p><p>“Yeah,” he says, “Good point.”</p><p>“That’s not really an answer,” she says, surprising herself with her bravery.</p><p>And Sam says something that slams into her like a freight train. He says: “Guess I missed you. I dunno. You used to come around a lot.”</p><p>“I could, still,” she says, when she thinks she’s got her breath back. It feels like a lie, even as she’s saying it. Not with Ginger. And looking at Sam, he knows. He knows this about her — that she’s tied to Ginger more than she’s ever gonna be tied to him, or anyone else, and something flickers through his eyes, changes in his face, but it’s so subtle that she thinks she probably shouldn’t have been looking hard enough to notice. He doesn’t call her bluff, though. He just says “Well, you know where to find me.”</p><p>~</p><p>“Where the fuck did you go?” Ginger asks her, as they make their way through the halls to their next class. </p><p>“Nowhere, I just didn’t go to class,” Brigitte says. They take their seats in the back, and Brigitte starts opening up her stuff — finds her binder, her femur pen, keeps digging in her bag for nothing at all so that she doesn’t have to meet Ginger’s questions dead on. </p><p>“<em>You</em>. Didn’t go to class?” Ginger asks, as though all the times Brigitte has willingly skipped with her don’t count for anything just because Ginger wasn’t there. Brigitte shoots her one quick look through her hair that says <em>come on</em>. </p><p>“You could have at least—” and then an unfamiliar voice reaches them. The bell rings. They’re in Mr. Wayne’s class, but the teacher up at the front isn’t Mr. Wayne, and it settles over the both at the same time that it will never be Mr. Wayne again. Slowly, Brigitte sits up in her seat, her eyes on the unfamiliar person at the front. She can’t bring herself to look at Ginger, not fully, but in the corner of her eye, Ginger is very still and very silent. </p><p>The papers said that it was the Beast of Bailey Downs that got him and the janitor, but Brigitte wonders if everyone will believe that. How could an animal that size get into the school, and then out again? Maybe people are looking for easy answers. Still, she wonders if they look suspicious, her and Ginger, and suddenly she can’t remember how she normally looks in this class, or any class. So she puts her head down, her hair almost brushing the desk in a protective curtain, and she takes notes, absently, until the bell rings. Just writes down whatever the teacher says without actually hearing any of it. She isn’t even sure Ginger opens her books. When the day is finally over, Ginger’s first to be packed up, first out of her seat. She doesn’t wait for Brigitte, and Brigitte’s heart sinks because she doesn’t know if Ginger’s mad at her now, or again or what. </p><p>They walk home together like always, but Ginger’s distracted. Supper’s even more torturous than usual, because Ginger is visiting another planet or something, and every time Brigitte cuts her eyes Ginger’s way at something Pamela says, Ginger’s just got her gaze down on her food, and each time, it slices through Brigitte like when you cut yourself with something too sharp to bleed right away.</p><p>After, Ginger showers and then disappears somewhere else, leaving Brigitte to do her homework with Unsolved Mysteries playing in the background. She misses the days when things were simpler. Ginger comes back down the stairs and passes her wordlessly, but her glance seems normal. She’s not glaring or ignoring her. When she reappears she’s dressed and Brigitte stops writing.</p><p>“Where’re you going?”</p><p>Ginger smiles at her as she drops down beside her on the sagging couch, but her eyes are guarded. “You want to go for a drive?”</p><p>“Where? With who?”</p><p>“Um, no one, really, just Jason.”</p><p>“You want me to go for ‘a drive’ with Jason McCardy?”</p><p>“C’mon, Bee, we’ll go to the lake. The big one, remember that summer?”</p><p>“That’s like an hour away!”</p><p>“So?”</p><p>“No,” Brigitte says. Just the idea of the darkness, the vast expanse of the shoreline around that lake terrifies her. “Ginger… you can’t.”</p><p>“Too late, he’s on his way.”</p><p>“Do you not remember what happened the last time we went out after dark?”</p><p>Ginger looks away from her, fidgeting, sulking. “So what? You can’t just be scared forever.”</p><p>“Ginge, it was like barely a month ago. You could have died.”</p><p>“Yeah, but I didn’t,” Ginger says, and looks at her again. “Please, Bee, come with me.”</p><p>“No,” Brigitte says, but her resolve is faltering.</p><p>“No one’s even going to be there. It’ll just be us.”</p><p>“And Jason.”</p><p>“He’s like… our portal. He’s got a car. C’mon. Free transit.”</p><p>“It’s not free, though.”</p><p>Ginger twitches, draws back a little. </p><p>“He’s just trying to get into your pants, right?” Brigitte asks, voice careful. And she doesn’t like the way Ginger’s eyes change. Like maybe Brigitte burnt her a little.</p><p>“Yeah well… he did already, and it sucked, so now he owes <em>me</em> a favour.”</p><p>Brigitte thinks it doesn’t work like that, that guys never owe girls anything after it’s all said and done. They just get what they want, get their way, and then get out of there.</p><p>Ginger says “You’re gonna let me go alone?”</p><p>Brigitte thinks <em>Sam has a car</em>, but she doesn’t say it, because of what it insinuates. That maybe he owes her a favour, too, which he doesn’t. If anything, she owes him for making the cure, for helping to save her sister who, in this moment, Brigitte feels as if she barely knows anymore. </p><p>“I dunno, Ginge.”</p><p>“You’re just gonna sit here… doing this? Doing homework and watching fucking Unsolved Mysteries again? We’ve seen all these, they never fucking figure it out.”</p><p>“Well. They’re unsolved,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“Fuck off,” Ginger says, but she almost smiles. Brigitte doesn’t. This used to be what they did. Shoulder to shoulder on this couch. Homework and hot chocolate in winter and Unsolved Mysteries. They’d make fun of it, or try to solve it themselves. They’d go to the library and research it, sometimes, and Brigitte aches for that. Like that’s… a time that was special, and she realizes all at once that what she considers childhood, and longs for, Ginger looks at now and sees as childish. She wants nothing to do with it now. Now she wants to go to the lake with guys in the middle of the night.</p><p>“What am I s’posed to do while you hang out with Jason?”</p><p>“I’m going with Jason to hang out with you.”</p><p>Brigitte narrows her eyes. “So we can, what? Stay a hundred yards from him and hang out while he just stands around? I don’t think he’s gonna go for that, Ginger.”</p><p>“Jesus, fine. You know what? Don’t come.”</p><p>Brigitte feels her heart drop. “I never said—”</p><p>“You didn’t have to.” Ginger stands up and disappears into their room. A little while later Brigitte hears the car pull up near the neighbours — the same place she told Sam to stop — so Pam and Henry didn’t notice. And she hears the window in their room open and half-close as Ginger leaves. Without her.</p><p>Brigitte waits for a while, until the car pulls away. She mutes the TV and just sits in the quiet. Her parents must be in bed. She can’t hear anything but the motor of the deep freeze in the laundry room. </p><p>Eventually she gets up and goes into their room with every intention of going to bed, but she’s restless. She can’t shake it. She paces a little, shivering against the cold breeze, but she’s got to leave the window open for Ginger. She almost can’t believe she left without her. Almost. The other part of her isn’t surprised, and that’s what scares her. That that part might grow, overshadow the part that’s shocked… until it switches — mirror image, and Ginger doing things with her is the more shocking thing. </p><p>That thought is so terrifying that Brigitte wants to throw up. She actually goes into the bathroom, pale and shaking and takes deep breaths to steady herself. In the mirror, her reflection is pale and dark-eyed. She looks like a ghost. She looks boney and small in her pyjamas, almost, she thinks, grotesque. The fabric is so soft, but her shoulders are hunched sharply, too angular to be surrounded by the lavender grey fabric. It doesn’t suit her. She turns away from her reflection and pulls them off. </p><p>She can’t stay here, she realizes, just waiting for Ginger to show up again. She should have gone, at least to make sure nothing happened.</p><p>She goes through the closet for something else, shivering. She wants something darker, something that can make her invisible and finds a dress that used to be their mom’s. The dress is dark grey with darker grey shapes — maybe flowers or delicate paisley, but the fabric is faded now and maybe she’s never looked closely. The fabric is sturdy, but light — a summer dress — with narrow straps and a v-line neck that would have looked right on Pamela, or even Ginger, but just hangs off of Brigitte. It doesn’t matter, though, because over it goes two sweaters, one pull-over, one button-up, and then Ginger’s black hoodie that used to be their dad’s. Brigitte digs the leggings she wore to school today out from the dirty laundry and pulls them on beneath the dress. It doesn't even occur to her, until she's dressed, that she plans on going out there, into the darkness.</p><p>But the Beast of Bailey Downs is dead, she reminds herself. Ginger will be fine, she’ll be… she has to be fine. But something’s burning in her now, a pull so strong she almost can’t resist it. She hikes up the dress and climbs out the window, carefully letting it fall on the piece of wood that keeps it open enough to stop it from locking shut. </p><p>And then she runs, trying to shake whatever this feeling is. This thing that feels an awful lot like betrayal. She thinks she’s more afraid of Ginger leaving her, than running into some horrible creature in the night, and even that’s too scary to think on too long. She doesn’t even know where she’s going, or she doesn’t let herself think on it too long before she finds herself facing the grassy front lawn of the greenhouses.</p><p>It is, she realizes, the middle of the night, and he’s probably sleeping and what the fuck is she doing here, anyway? She should be home. She should be with Ginger. This is crazy. The greenhouses are all dark and she imagines heading back home and if Ginger’s there by then she can just say she went for a walk.</p><p>And that’s another lie. Just like when she lied about where she got the silver ring she used to pierce her naval. She isn’t a liar, she’s never been very good at it, especially not to people’s faces — especially not to <em>Ginger</em> — and she doesn’t want to start now. Maybe that’s stupid. Ginger told her, once, that you couldn’t survive in this world without lying, and Brigitte doesn’t know if that’s true or not. She turns back towards the street just as light washes over her from somewhere, blinding her for a second. She blinks the glare away and recognizes the County Regreening van. Sam, back from somewhere. Her stomach does something strange, and she half thinks about just leaving which would make her look ridiculous but she almost doesn’t care. He doesn’t cut the engine when he stops a few feet beyond her in the driveway, just pops his door open and mutters something like “Jesus christ. Brigitte.”</p><p>She’s frozen.</p><p>“What’s up?” He’s all trepidation. Which makes sense. She’s just standing here outside his place in the middle of the night like a total freak.</p><p>“Uh, nothing,” she says, too casual.</p><p>He just looks at her for a second, and then he laughs — just with his mouth, flash of teeth, with his breath, but not his eyes. He cuts the engine and the silence feels deafening. She watches as he undoes his seatbelt and hops down from the cab. There’s a cigarette behind his ear. He looks at her as he shuts the van door, toying with his keys. “You okay?”</p><p>“Yeah, I just… um.”</p><p>This is probably the least intelligent conversation they’ve ever had, and it’s killing her. It seems like it’s killing him too, and he toys awkwardly with his keys. </p><p>“Sorry,” she says. Because of course. She’s always sorry because she can’t seem to say anything else around him all of a sudden. What the hell is wrong with her? She can practically hear Ginger making fun of her. But Ginger abandoned her for Jason and the lake, so Brigitte almost feels like she shouldn’t care what Ginger thinks. Almost.</p><p>Sam ignores her sorry, though, thank god. He says “You wanna come in for a minute?” and there’s a hitch, she hears it. <em>You wanna come in — for a minute.</em> Just so he’s clear. <em>I do not think of you that way.</em></p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>So she follows him through the greenery. It’s dark in the front part, the plants making strange silhouettes all around her. He doesn’t turn on any lights, but there’s the click and flash of his lighter as he lights the cigarette he had behind his ear — this gorgeous spark of orange that catches the plant leaves, reaching like they know him, missed him. He brushes his fingers over the leaves of a yucca palm and Brigitte keeps a safe distance behind him. She thinks that maybe she shouldn’t be watching him so closely. She walks right in the centre of the aisle so the plants don’t brush against her. She kind of half thinks that she’d tear them somehow, or bend them. Like maybe they wouldn’t like her.</p><p>He unlocks the Staff Only door that leads to his office and, beyond that the door to his room. He flicks lights on in there. The wall switch is connected to the lamps, because there’s no overhead light in here. Only one flicks on, the one by his bed, and Sam swears and goes around flicking on the others one by one until it’s bright enough.</p><p>“Jesus,” Sam says, “you look cold. Did you walk here?”</p><p>“It’s not that far. Where—… Were you working?”</p><p>“Kind of,” Sam says, cagey. He’s moving around the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “Do you want… coffee or something? I have tea, but it’s just… regular. Orange Pekoe.”</p><p>“Okay,” she says, and then realizes she didn’t clarify. She guesses it doesn’t matter, she’d drink both.</p><p>“I, uh… I know this guy who knows a lot about hydroponics, up in Barrie,” Sam says as he keeps himself busy with getting cups for tea. “He’s really good at it and I thought… hey, use a setup like that — maybe smaller — make my life easier, once it’s set up, but…”</p><p>“You mean for pot?”</p><p>Sam smiles at her. “Yeah. Save a lot on water. It’s efficient. Plus I’d like to experiment a little. I think I’ve got a pretty decent product, but… I dunno… see, there’s all this research about growing food hydroponically versus in soil. With food grown in soil, there’s — the root structures are stronger, even if you get smaller plant, but they taste better grown in the ground. Anyway, I asked myself at what point is a consumable not a food? Like if you just smoke pot, and if you have a plant that produces more with hydroponics, is is better or just more lucrative than pot grown in soil? Do I want to sacrifice quality for quantity… I dunno, I’m just not sold on it, I guess.”</p><p>“I don’t think people at the high school care about the quality that much,” Brigitte says. And it’s mean to be an insult towards them — the other kids at school, but it doesn’t come out that way, and she realizes a second too late. </p><p>Sam laughs, pushing a hand through his hair, glancing at the curtain that hides his pot from the rest of the room, keeps them warm. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”</p><p>“I… didn’t mean it like…”</p><p>“No, you’re right,” Sam says. “I’m the only guy around.”</p><p>“Sorry.” <em>Fuck</em>. She thinks<em> I know you care.</em></p><p>Sam says “Probably a waste of time anyway.”</p><p>“Maybe it’s not,” she says, trying to backtrack, but she thinks she’s way too late now.</p><p>“Hey, no… you’re right, it’s a waste of money to set it up. When it doesn’t matter anyway.”</p><p>Brigitte blinks, letting that settle. She likes him better when he isn’t so self-defeating, but she hears herself in it. Sometimes she thinks he feels just like she does.</p><p>“I could help,” she says. “You should try it, if you want to. You could teach me.”</p><p>Sam’s gone still, watching her. “Teach you how to grow pot?”</p><p>“It’s interesting,” she says. </p><p>“You thinking about becoming the competition?” Sam teases.</p><p>“I’m pretty good at figuring out how things go together,” Brigitte tells him. “I always fix stuff at home. I can build stuff… You’ll need a— like a setup right? Don’t they use pipes? And besides, your arm…”</p><p>“You can’t— I’m not going to ask you to help me grow pot. It’s illegal.”</p><p>“Who says it’s for pot? You work in a greenhouse.” Suddenly she really wants to. She wants him to just do this, because he wants to do it.</p><p>Sam’s looking at her like… it makes it kind of hard to breathe. She looks away. The kettle clicks off and he almost jumps, shaking himself out of it. She keeps her head down, hiding, and then suddenly he’s holding out a mug for her and she takes it. She’d forgotten how cold her hands were until she holds something hot. </p><p>“You know what?” Sam says, leaning against the table near her. “Let’s do it. But it’s strictly… I don’t want you to get involved with this stuff,” Sam says, eyes on the bags of dried stuff he’s getting ready to sell. “Okay. Anyone asks you, and you had no idea. I take the fall, understand?”</p><p>She shrugs a shoulder. </p><p>“C’mon, Brigitte, you gotta give me your word.”</p><p>“I don’t know anything about the drugs,” she says. She shifts to lean back against the table, and suddenly they’re almost arm to arm, standing together facing the room, holding onto their cups. It’s so familiar. All the awkwardness from earlier is gone, and she realizes how much she missed the greenhouse.</p><p>“I think hoya do really well in hydroponics,” Sam says. </p><p>Brigitte almost smiles. He gets something close to a laugh — that quick exhale through her nose. “Is that my cover?”</p><p>“You’re so not someone I’d associate with hoya, but sure, that’s your cover.”</p><p>Brigitte’s still. She wonders <em>what would you associate me with?</em> but it’s such a terrifying question that she doesn’t ask it. Like she'd either realize he really knew her, or that he really didn't.</p><p>“So. You know where I was — doing illicit things. Why are you all the way out here in the middle of the night?”</p><p>“I just couldn’t sleep,” Brigitte says. Sam doesn’t press her, but he’s quiet, waiting. “And Ginger… left to go to the lake with Jason, and I didn’t want to go, so now we’re in a fight.”</p><p>“It’s November,” Sam says. “The lake?”</p><p>Brigitte shrugs. “It’s where people go.”</p><p>“You really don’t like him, huh?”</p><p>“He’s an asshole.”</p><p>“It’ll probably blow over,” he says, pulling out the chair at his desk and sitting down in front of his weed. “High school stuff’s… yeah, you know. Ephemeral.”</p><p>Brigitte thinks about Jason cornering her in the janitor’s closet at school, and how she’s scared of him more now than she ever was before. She thinks about how she could have told Ginger that, but she didn’t, because she’s scared of what it will mean if it doesn’t matter to Ginger. If hanging with Jason’s more important to her than what he did. Or could have done. </p><p>She thinks that she really fucking hopes nothing like that happens to Ginger, but what if it does? She should have gone with her. </p><p>She drinks her tea and listens to Sam talk about herbal ones he’s made in the past, and their properties. He talks like he’s just filling the silence, his voice soft and consistent enough to keep her from feeling awkward. She watches him sorting and organizing the bags of dried pot on the table by weight, she thinks, and she finishes her tea but doesn’t know what to do with her cup, so she just hangs onto it.</p><p>Sam finishes up and rubs a hand over his eyes like he’s tired. She checks her watch, and it’s two in the morning. Her stomach sinks a little, because Pam and Henry never notice they’re gone, but this is later than usual. And it’s different, because they’re not together — her and Ginger.</p><p>“You want me to take you home?” Sam asks. </p><p>She hesitates because she does. She does and she doesn’t, because she doesn’t entirely want to be home, but she knows she should be. She doesn’t think Ginger will be back yet. It takes an hour to drive to the lake and they’ll probably be there for a while. Brigitte thinks that she could probably walk home, but it’s cold and late, and she’s tired. But so is he.</p><p>She looks away from him, debating, but then Sam pushes his chair back and suddenly he’s right there. She tenses, but there’s nowhere to go with the table at her back. He’s very careful when he takes her cup by the rim, like he’s sorry he freaked her out. “C’mon’ he says, once it’s in his hands. He takes both cups to the sink, then grabs his coat and keys. She follows him out.</p><p>“You gonna be in trouble?”</p><p>“They probably don’t know I’m gone.”</p><p>She doesn’t have to tell him where to park, he slows outside the neighbours’ to let her out. She’s careful to shut the door quietly. The wood is still in the window, and Ginger’s still gone when Brigitte eases it open and slips inside. She leaves the wood in place and then stands, stranded in the room that’s both of theirs and wonders what she wants to do. She could leave the clothes she’s wearing out — leave them on the floor or put them in the laundry. Either way, Ginger will notice. Or she could hang everything up like it’s never been worn, and then she won’t have to explain herself. She doesn’t know what she wants. Whether she wants Ginger to know she has a life outside of her, outside of <em>them</em>. </p><p><em>Except you don’t,</em> she hears herself think. </p><p>In the end she hangs everything up, throws the leggings back into the laundry basket, and gets into bed. In the morning, Ginger’s there, fast asleep with her back to Brigitte, and the sun in her hair, highlighting the gold in it. Like this, Brigitte could almost pretend that none of it happened.</p><p>But it doesn’t work like that.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Working with one arm in a sling’s a bitch, and there’s some things he just can’t do that he feels like he should be doing like fixing the crumbling stone in the central wall and adding more black earth to the plants in the front greenhouse. It’s all causing him a hell of a lot of anxiety, and everything takes longer than it should. He’s about ready to give up by lunch and the swigs of rye he has with it are probably ill-advised, but also a good indicator that he needs to just… stop for a minute. But it’s Friday, he thinks. And Brigitte said she would be here tomorrow. Two p.m. isn’t too early to close up shop, Sam thinks, not on a weekend. So he does.</p><p>The thing about the greenhouse, though, is that the work is never really done. There’s no such thing as weekends, just days without customers and he thinks that maybe it says something that he's sick as hell of dealing with people five days a week, but he wants to see Brigitte on Saturday. He tries to recall the last time he looked forward to something — like, before her. Before this whole lycanthrope thing fucked up all their lives — and he can’t. Not really. He thinks it was probably before his dad died, and he’s only twenty-three, but nineteen feels like a really really long time ago. </p><p>
  <em>“She skipped a grade, you know. I mean… she’s basically still in middle school.”</em>
</p><p>Sam sighs hard, pulls the cigarette from behind his ear and tries to light it, but the light doesn’t catch. He leaves it between his lips and gets up to search for another lighter, banging through drawers in the kitchen. And Sam’s not going to tell himself lies about how she’s mature enough, wise beyond her years or anything like that. All he knows is that they’ve gone through some shit together and come out the other side, and they connect. Like they’re on this wavelength. It’s not like what Trina thinks. It’s her company Sam’s after, he’s not chasing skirt. And he kinda thinks Brigitte’s just as lonely as he is. Like maybe they’re not done needing each other, yet, even though they’ve found the cure already.</p><p>Does he need her, though? Is that what they’re doing? Or is this using each other, like he and Trina had done? Each of them searching desperately for what the other had got and always, always coming up empty. And he isn’t sure whether Brigitte <em>needs</em> him. Frankly, the prospect of anyone needing him almost makes him laugh. He doesn’t have much to offer up, not to anyone. It just so happened that Brigitte needed plants that could be used as medicine — the superoxidant re: radical detox — and he’s the greenhouse keeper. He had the stuff. He kind of thinks a girl like Brigitte doesn’t need anyone, but she thinks she needs her sister. And maybe she does. He can see from a mile away that that’s a codependent relationship he doesn’t want to get involved in, and it’s also not his business. Not anymore. His side of the arrangement with Ginger is done. And as for Brigitte, he’s good with just seeing her, talking without the weight of folkloric monsters hanging over their heads.</p><p>It’s just that it gave them something to talk about. Lycanthropy, the gateway drug. And now he’s afraid he won’t have much to hold her interest, even with the hydroponics. But she seemed genuinely interested, right? He’s not making that up. She seemed interested and he catches himself thinking about tomorrow all evening as he drives up to Barrie to get the stuff and then drives back to Bailey Downs with her in his head and all this hydroponic equipment rattling in the back.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She has no idea what time she’s supposed to show, so she shows up around nine-thirty which is a little after the work-day starts, even though it’s Saturday. Sam strikes her as someone who sleeps late but when he answers the door clearly having been up and about for a while she wonders if she’s stereotyping. Because of the pot. He’s got that antsy energy to him again and he says “Hey,” almost breathlessly, barely looking at her, already turning back into his part of the greenhouse and waving her in. She follows.</p><p>He’s got a bunch of wood and some fibreglass. A bunch of… “What’s this?”</p><p>“Rain gutters,” Sam says. “Galvanized steel. Last summer I replaced someone’s PVC gutters with these. That shit’s not built to withstand our winters. Anyway, I uh… needed less than expected, so I had them around. Seemed like a waste to toss them.” </p><p>Brigitte looks at the stuff, feeling a little daunted, but she doesn’t want to show it. “So, do we have a plan, or?”</p><p>“I kind of… yeah. Know how I want it to go.” He goes quiet and she looks back at him. “D’you want coffee? And I’ll show you what I’ve got in mind.”</p><p>~</p><p>She’s glad for the coffee. It gets rid of the headache starting behind her eyes, and the foggy feeling she had as soon as she stepped in from the cold outside. They sit on the sofa in the middle greenhouse where the sun’s warming the place up quickly. It’s brighter than Sam’s room and, out here she can see that his hair is still wet from the shower, and she thinks that’s going to fuck up the cigarette he puts behind his ear for later. He hunches over the coffee table in front of them as he quickly sketches out what he’s thinking.</p><p>She’s sort of fixed on his fingers as he draws out a shape almost like a picnic table. The plants will sit in rows of four or five on top of it, in the rain gutters, which will be pumped mineral nutrient solution through an irrigation pipe from a tank below. Another gutter will collect the runoff and deposit it back into the tank to be re-mineralized and reused.  It’s actually much simpler than she thought it would be, but neither of them know if it will really come together.</p><p>“How will it get up the pipe?” she asks.</p><p>“I’ve got a pump. Should do a couple gallons an hour or so…”</p><p>And so they finish their coffee and get to work. Sam’s arm is still in a sling and he’s managing okay, but not well enough to handle everything as a one person job. Together they rig up a table that will fit into the small space he already has weed growing in pots. The idea is to move those up higher and get the table beneath it, with lights properly in place. Like two separate systems. </p><p>Conversation comes easily. Almost surprisingly so. They talk about anything but lycanthropy. Acting like maybe they’re almost normal people who never experienced any of that. People who’ve never had the fabric of their world torn just enough to see the possibilities beneath the surface.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“Where’d you learn how to build things, anyway?” he asks her, testing the stability of the table's legs.</p><p>She shoots the table a furtive look from beneath her hair like she’s almost surprised she’s managed it, and then she sits back on the rug, cross-legged and shrugs. “Sometimes things in our room break. Like, once Ginger broke one of the dresser drawers because it kept sticking, so I fixed it, um… and the windowsill cracked, last winter because of the cold, and then the window wouldn’t close all the way, in January and we almost froze to death. Our room’s in the basement,” she clarifies, “So it’s cold anyway, but… I guess I like it. Fixing stuff. And then it means Henry doesn’t come down to do it, so. Bonus.”</p><p>Sam watches her examine her hand, picking at a splinter that’s lodged itself into the soft place between her thumb and her index finger. </p><p>“Why d’you call your parents by their first names?”</p><p>Brigitte cocks her head a little, like she’s considering it, then looks up at him. Look at him in that way where she searches his face but never quite meets his eyes. She starts to speak, then stops again, furrowing her brow. Sam just stays quiet, giving her a chance to suss it out.</p><p>“I dunno,” she finally says. “Because they don’t really feel like parents, maybe. Like, they’re basically just people we live with. We barely know each other. They don’t understand us.”</p><p>Sam smiles a little, can’t help it. He looks away before he breathes a laugh, but it’s too late, and she’s noticed. He doesn’t even have to look at her to see that she’s scowling at him.</p><p>“What.”</p><p>“Nothing,” Sam says. “I think everyone feels like that at some point.”</p><p>“It’s different. Pamela’s like… like she wants us to be totally different. Like she doesn’t know what to do with us. So she pretends we’re a certain way when we aren’t. She thinks we should care about… stuff we don’t. Guys and…” she trails off and Sam can practically see her thinking it. That Ginger cares about guys.</p><p>“Hey, are you still fighting? You and Ginger?”</p><p>She looks at him with this steely look in her eyes that’s halfway between a warning and a wild creature trapped. Fierce enough that he goes still. “No,” she says, and she’s suddenly guarded. </p><p>“You can bring her, then,” Sam says. “I mean. If you want.”</p><p>“It would be weird,” she tells him, and looks down.</p><p>“Why?” Sam asks. And then answers the question himself. “She doesn’t like me.”</p><p>“She doesn’t like anyone.”</p><p>“‘Cept you, right?”</p><p>“Used to be,” Brigitte says. “She’s with Jason. She went out with him again today.”</p><p>And Sam thinks <em>If she didn’t, would you be here?</em> but he doesn’t say it. Instead he just sits quietly, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear and setting it between his lips without lighting it. </p><p>“Like you care,” Brigitte says, and it's not the first time she's said it to him, but it surprises him. Maybe because he does. She gets up, and he watches her move to look into the closet where his weed’s growing, the stuff planted in soil. She sucks at the splinter in her hand. “What’s going to happen to all this?” she asks, looking back.</p><p>“Uh,” Sam says, and gets up, too. That conversation’s done, and he lets it drop. “Plan was to move it up. Our table will go underneath and I’ll rig up another light down here, stack the two systems.”</p><p>“How’re you gonna move it all?” she asks.</p><p>Sam looks at it all, and it does seem fairly daunting with one arm in a sling, but he says “I’ll manage.”</p><p>“I could… I could come back to help.” She says sentences sometimes like she’s testing every word. Sam looks at her, but she looks away.</p><p>“If you want,” he says.</p><p>“Tomorrow?”</p><p>“Sure, come tomorrow.”</p><p>~</p><p>She shows again on Sunday, a little earlier than she did the day before. She’s quieter than yesterday, but she seems… present. Like she wants to be here. He thinks that something probably still going on with that sister of hers, but he remembers the look she gave him yesterday, when he asked, so he leaves it alone. Instead he talks to her, while they work, about how he grows the weed, what variety it is, and the fact that he gives a shit about his product and it’s not just the cash it brings in.</p><p>“It costs a lot,” Brigitte says, speaking up for the first time in a little while.</p><p>“I mean... yeah. I make it worth the price, though.”</p><p>“It’s weird,” Brigitte says. She keeps pushing her hair off the back of her neck because it’s warm in here, even with the heat turned down. Admittedly she’s working harder than he is, because he can’t lift the trays and containers down with one working arm. He wonders why she doesn’t tie it up, but then he’s never seen her without her hair hiding her face, so it’s probably protective. “Like, do you really need the money? With the Country Regreening Program and stuff…”</p><p>Sam stills, licking his lower lip as he looks around. “Yeah, I’m… I’m saving to get out of here. Maybe sell this place.”</p><p>He catches her eyes. She nods, and her eyes flicker over everything before she looks down. She picks something from beneath her thumbnail. He can’t read her. Thinks maybe she’s disappointed in this. Or him. “It’s not like… I mean I charge as much as the next guy,” he hears himself saying. It doesn’t sound right, even though it’s true and he swallows. And he realizes all at once that she makes him nervous, because he cares what she thinks of him. And he’s not used to that.</p><p>“D’you sell anywhere else outside my school?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Sam says. “Parties. Toronto, sometimes.”</p><p>She looks at him like she’s trying to picture him there and can’t quite manage. “You know, I thought you’d be like, totally different,” Brigitte says. “You act different, when you’re selling at school.”</p><p>“Yeah, well. How d’you know I’m not acting different now, and the dealer at your school's who I really am?”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>He smiles, and thinks maybe it’s genuine so he looks down and touches his fingers softly to the soil of one of the plants, checking its moisture levels. “Maybe I figured this is who you’d need me to be.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She can feel her heart beating. Not faster or harder, just beating away in her chest. For a moment she feels very solid here, like she’s actually living out her own life in her own body, and things are happening to her. She feels very real. She smiles at him in that sardonic way she has, half her mouth, a little more than half genuine. “Pretty convincing act,” she says. “To go out and buy all those books on botany and folklore and magical herbs just to pretend to be someone you aren’t.”</p><p>Because of course he didn’t buy all those books to pretend to be something different. He had them already. Sam, she thinks, is weird like she is, but in different ways. And it all comes together oddly when she looks at it in fragments — like she doesn’t get how the person who keeps skin mags by his bed is the same person who writes in the margins of books on flower cultivation, or how either of those are the same person as the guy who wears dark sunglasses and sells pot at a high school, or how that’s the same person who believed her when she essentially cried wolf, but really meant it, and then helped her make a cure.</p><p>Sam looks up at her. He looks vulnerable, she thinks, like maybe he’s feeling as raw and real as she is, and she wants to protect him. And she feels her own realness sort of flicker, like she wants to hide inside the person she presents to the world. </p><p>She looks away first and says softly “I’m not exactly me, either.” She’s never said that before, but it’s something she’s coming to understand. She feels like she’s herself with Ginger, and only then. She doesn’t know how to translate that person to someone who makes sense in the rest of the world. </p><p>“Who’s Brigitte, then?” Sam asks her, quiet, and she’s totally honest when she shrugs one shoulder and glances up.</p><p>“I dunno.”</p><p>~</p><p>They finish before supper, and it’s not dark yet so she walks home. There’s still more to do. The table fits perfectly into the closet, and they put the growing plants back into their temporary space to keep the heat and light on them, but they still have to fit shelves above to move those plants up, and then set up the actual hydroponics equipment. It’s probably two more days work, maybe three. She’s never fitted shelves before, though, and tomorrow’s Monday, so she won’t be able to show until after school. He tells her that he’ll figure something out and not to worry about coming, but she kind of hopes he doesn’t. She’d liked the fact that this was their project, but then again, it’s a business he needs to keep running, one she knows almost nothing about, so she doesn’t say anything.</p><p>They sort of tentatively agree on next weekend, but as soon as the greenhouse is out of sight she wonders if that was just pleasantries, and maybe it’s not really going to happen. And she shouldn’t care anyway, right? It’s easier to tell herself that she just wants to finish the thing she started, and she's disappointed someone else might do it in her place. But it’s just shelves. She shouldn’t care so much.</p><p>She gets home for supper, but Ginger’s chair is empty. She’s ‘out.’ That’s that Pamela tells her and Henry, positively beaming at them over beef stew. Brigitte feels her stomach twist, sickly. She’s never wanted to leave the supper table so much in her life. </p><p>“I’m so glad you girls are finally going out and <em>mingling</em>,” Pam chirps. “It’s good for you.”</p><p>Mingling. Brigitte hates that word. She forces herself to eat, and then makes some excuse about homework and flees to the sanctuary of their bedroom, but it feels strange and hollow without Ginger there, so she takes her school stuff out to the rec room and does her homework with the TV on low. It’s Unsolved Mysteries again, and that, at least, is comforting.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>Ginger likes kissing. She likes being <em>kissed</em>. Jason McCardy isn’t different when he’s not around his friends, he’s just softer. More like a person than a breeder at school. Breeders. That’s what Brigitte calls them, and with a twist in her gut she wonders if that’s what she is, too. She pulls away from him. They’re in the front seats of Jason’s beat up Volvo that he says is from the 70s. They’re both breathless, but even where she likes kissing, it doesn’t give her that same feeling, that same <em>hunger</em> it did when she was… Turning. Changing. </p><p><em>Into what?</em> She wonders. She feels like a part of herself has been ripped out. Like whatever that thing was that bit her had pulled the veil off of something inside her, shook out the dust and she saw something beautiful and powerful, and then Brigitte killed it with that purple flower. She doesn’t know what it was, or what it means, and she doesn’t know why Brigitte gets all tense and edgy every time she brings it up — what it was like, what she feels like she’s missing — the clearer hearing, the feeling of belonging in her own body for the first time ever in her miserable life. And she wonders what it means that she kind of wants it back, but Brigitte doesn’t.</p><p>Ginger’s staring at the dash, and she reaches out to turn on the radio, but the car’s off. Right. </p><p>“The car’s off,” Jason tells her.</p><p><em>Duh</em>, Ginger thinks, and surreptitiously turns the volume way up. She says “D’you ever miss it?” and twists in the passenger seat to look at Jason who’s hair’s mussed from her fingers. It’s dark up here, parked on the look-off, but they can still see. Moon’s almost full. He meets her eyes.</p><p>“No,” he says, too fast.</p><p>“C’mon Jase,” she wheedles. “You don’t?”</p><p>“No. I killed my dog. I dunno… it was like it took something from me, who I was, ya know? Like I could feel it. Just beneath the surface. Like it was waiting to pull me under and drown me so it could…” he exhales once, hard. “I dunno. Take my place?”</p><p>Ginger narrows her eyes at him, like she’ll be able to catch the lie, but she doesn’t see one. She didn’t feel like it took something from her. The thing in the park did that. Tore her up and shook her around just to hurt her. What started growing in <em>her</em>, though. She felt like that was an extension of herself, something inside… something that had always been there, not something that was invading. She wonders what that says. Maybe she’s always been the monster, all along. </p><p>“I mean, didn’t it scare you?” Jason asks her, this serrated edge to his voice like he’s not sure, suddenly, if <em>he</em> should feel different. And that’s why she likes him. He’s so easy to read and, alone like this, he’s got all these vulnerable places that he lets her see. She wants to… know. She wants her fingers over those soft places he’s got, like bruised fruit, with the possibly of pressing down. Only she wouldn’t. She wants that trust, from him. She wants him to know she’s in control, that she has the power to <em>hurt</em>, but that she won’t do it. She wants to be able to look into his eyes and see faith instead of fear.</p><p>“I mean…” she says, and her voice wavers and Jason moves like he gives a shit. He touches her hair and Ginger fights not to move away beneath the touch. She doesn’t want to be coddled, she wants to be allowed to feel her goddamn emotions without intervention, without being spun and spun until she’s facing the direction everyone wants her to face. She wants to be able to live inside of herself while she fucking feels something and not have that thing mediated by every single person around her. And she thinks about it, his question. Like <em>really</em> thinks about it. “It did scare me, but not in a bad way.” She thinks <em>I was in control</em>, but she wasn’t. She knows she wasn’t. She was wild and Bee was cleaning up her mess. Bee was covering for her with Mr. Wayne, and their parents, and even with fucking Sam.</p><p>Her eyes flicker to the lights below — the town spread out beneath the look-off. The greenhouse is all lit up. It reminds her of the fires lit to burn witches in the 1700s or whenever it was. Brigitte would know. “It was like watching a horror movie. Good scary.”</p><p>“You mean like not real,” Jason says. “Yeah, I could see how that wouldn’t feel real.”</p><p>Ginger thinks it was the realest she’s ever felt. “Let’s get out of here,” she says, reaching to pull her seatbelt on.</p><p>Jason turns the car on and the voice on the radio practically shatters the car’s windows. “Jesus!” Jason yelps, scrambling to turn it down, and Ginger practically dies laughing. “You bitch!” he says, breathless with the shock of it, but there’s no malice in it. She laughs until her stomach hurts, and then he’s with her, laughing, too.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. threads</h2></a>
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    <p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>These days, she sees Ginger more at school than she does at home, and it’s doing some weird things to her brain where the existential dread of school days mixes with the familiar comfort of having Ginger at her side and it leaves her feeling kind of nauseous all the time. She didn’t think it was possible to despise high school and, at the same time, desperately will the bell signalling the end of the day not to ring.</p><p>Something’s changed. It’s not immediately obvious, but then she’s been paying attention to Jason McCardy more than usual, since he’s currently the reason her sister’s practically never home. He’s still always with his friends, but the dynamic’s shifted. It isn’t until Thursday that Brigitte figures it out. It’s that Jason’s not centred anymore — never flanked. He’s always just a little on the outside of the group. Barely noticeable, but it’s there. It’s not Jason leading the chatter anymore, not Jason’s voice ringing out across the field in gym class, not his laughter in the back of the English classroom. He still goes through all the motions. He still gives props to Cal and Tim near Brigitte’s locker in the morning, still makes smart-alek remarks in class when he doesn’t know the answer, that even makes the teachers laugh. But he’s not really in it. Conversations float around him, between his friends, but they’re not really his conversations. And Brigitte realizes, all of a sudden, that they’re not really his friends. Not anymore.</p><p>She knew the politics of high school were fucked. </p><p>The November cold is really beginning to set in, and gym class is finally moved indoors. In some ways, that’s worse because it means no more sneaking cigarettes, and less distance between herself and the Trinas — Trina and her group of girls. It also means the noise reverberates around the room in a way that Brigitte hates.</p><p>“Just tell Miz. Sykes you’re ragging out,” Ginger. They’re the last two in the locker rooms as usual.</p><p>“From now until spring?” Brigitte asks, puling her sweater over her head so she can pull on the horrible Bailey Downs gym uniform shirt. She can hear the static as it comes over her head, and it’s all in her hair. She swipes at it, where strands cling to her cheeks, but that makes it worse. </p><p>Ginger glances at her and laughs a little, shoving her own things into their shared locker.</p><p>“Shut up,” Brigitte mutters, with no malice behind it.</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>A row of lockers away, Trina’s wrapping her ankle. She rolled it again back in September and apparently it’s just never going to heal because it still hurts when she goes running. She thought she was alone in here — she’s got a doctor’s note that lets her be late so she can do this. The Fitzgeralds voices make her go still for a moment, and then she reminds herself that she’s not scared of them so she finishes up, pulls her pant leg back down, and tests her weight. Then she steps around the corner to where they are, the words already in her throat — <em>uh, can you move? You’re blocking the door</em>, but as she steps around the corner she’s met with…</p><p>They’ve got these scratches. Scars, really. She sees them on Ginger first, snaking around her side beneath her ribs, and another set beneath the strap of her bra. Brigitte’s wearing a tank-top that’s almost the same dark purplish colour as the punctures in her arm. Like Freddy Kreuger fucking grabbed her or something. Brigitte sees Trina first and immediately steps closer to Ginger as the same time as she twists away to pull on the school gym shirt.</p><p>“Jesus christ,” Ginger says. Trina clearly freaked them out. Ginger holds her gym shirt against her torso, trying to hide the marks. “Fucking creep much, Trina?” </p><p>“You wish,” Trina says. She marches past them like it’s not totally fucked up. Like she doesn’t feel totally fucked up. “Bitch,” she mutters as she passes — she makes sure she’s out of arm’s length, though. After that bitch nearly broke her nose. Instead she vents her anger on the locker room room, slamming it open and walking out into the gym, and blessed normalcy.</p><p>Almost. </p><p>~</p><p>“They looked like claw marks.”</p><p>She watches Sam very closely, but he doesn’t even skip a beat as he lights a cigarette, his eyes on some kind of inventory list he’s got spread out all over the desk in his office. </p><p>“So what’re you saying?”</p><p>“Well, I dunno. It looks like something attacked them. Both of them. It could’ve been a dog. Maybe a big one.” She says it like questions, and when Sam finally looks up at her, she continues. “I mean, I’m just saying, they’re both totally weird, they’re like, obsessed with death and maybe, I dunno. What if they’re it? The thing killing all the dogs.”</p><p>“Trina… that’s fucking crazy.”</p><p>That stings. More than she thought it would. “Wow, okay.” </p><p>“Trina, come on. I mean, christ… Those girls are probably a hundred pounds soaking wet, there’s no fucking way they’re out there just… taking out big dogs without anyone noticing. Anyway, you said they were scarred. Whatever’s out there came recently, and things were normal even just last the summer. Look, unless they’ve got super healing powers—”</p><p>“Why are you doing this?”</p><p>“Why are you? Just forget them, you’ll be happier.”</p><p>“Ginger Fitzgerald fucking beat me up! She’s strong enough.”</p><p>“She what?” Sam says, and there’s genuine feeling in it. Like he cares, and that does something to her that makes it a little bit harder to breathe. “When?”</p><p>“I dunno. A few days ago; does it matter?”</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“Does it matter?”</p><p>“…No,” Sam answers, and then, “Did you tell someone?”</p><p>“Everyone saw it, it was in gym class.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Sam says, softly, and thinks that Brigitte never mentioned anything about that — that Ginger was hurting more than just dogs, she was hurting people. Hurting Trina.</p><p>~</p><p>Brigitte’s dark little figure on the bleachers is kind of hard to miss. It’s Friday afternoon and there’s not really anyone else out. It’s too cold for anyone but smokers, and so Sam doesn’t really feel that awkward tossing his equipment back into the van and crossing the grounds to her.</p><p>She looks up when she hears his boots on the metal bleachers, this quick glance through her hair before she realizes who it is and she sits up straighter. She’s holding onto her camera and she doesn’t say anything as he sits down next to her.</p><p>“Skipping?” he asks her after a beat.</p><p>“Free period.”</p><p>“Where’s Ginger?”</p><p>Brigitte pulls a face and shrugs. “Somewhere else.” </p><p>He nods, eyes flickering out over the field, the dying grass. The sky is that impossible winter white, and the puddles out there mirror the sky in blindingly white pools. It dazzles his eyes a little and he puts his sunglasses on, shifts to dig through his coat for his cigarette pack.</p><p>“Did you get your shelves put up?” she asks.</p><p>“I was coming to ask you about that, actually,” he says. “You free this weekend?”</p><p>He swears she almost smiles, but she looks away too fast for him to be totally sure. Whatever had brightened in her eyes disappears fast, and he can practically see her uncertainty close in around her as she squints out over the field. Unconsciously, she pulls some of her hair down to block the sun. “Um, probably,” she says.</p><p>“You should show, if you are. For shelves.”</p><p>She nods.</p><p>“If not, don’t worry about it,” he tells her. “D’you want a cigarette?”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>He opens his pack, but there’s only one left. “Fuck,” he says, remembering. “That’s what I was going to do.”</p><p>She exhales through her nose, almost a laugh. It’s cold enough to see their breath. “Never mind,” she says.</p><p>“No, take it. I’m cutting back anyway. Here. Come on.”</p><p>She looks at him, then at the cigarette he’s holding out to her like she thinks it’s a trick but she takes it because she doesn’t seem to know what else to do. She holds it carefully between thin fingers while she reaches for her bag to get her zippo. Her hands are chapped, cold looking. </p><p>“Here,” Sam says, and flicks his lighter. The flame’s barely visible in the daylight and she’s gone still as a meadow hare, trying hard to be invisible. She makes this awkward little movement, bringing the cigarette halfway to her mouth and stopping abruptly, almost reaching out as if to take the lighter from him, but then she doesn’t. She puts the smoke between her lips, and lets him light it for her. It doesn’t catch for what feels like an endless moment, and he puts his hand up to shield the flame, and also to stop her hair from blowing into it, brushing it away a little with his knuckles. When it lights, she practically flinches away from him, coughing slightly.</p><p>“Easy,” he says. She gives him a look. She knows how to smoke a cigarette. He watches her cough a couple more times into her sleeve before she takes a drag that goes down better. “Hey,” he says, “can I ask you something?”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Why uh… why didn’t you say anything about Ginger beating up Trina?”</p><p>When she looks at him, Sam keeps his eyes on hers — it’s easy with the sunglasses on. She looks away first, jaw tight. “Why are you asking about that?”</p><p>“Because, I dunno, Brigitte, that seems like it would’ve been good to know, back when we were trying to figure out a cure.”</p><p>“It had nothing to do with that,” Brigitte says. “Trina had it coming.”</p><p>“Jesus, are you fucking kidding me?”</p><p>“What did she tell you?”</p><p>“That Ginger attacked her during gym.”</p><p>“Did she tell you that Ginger was protecting me? Trina fucking— she’s on me, all the time. She shoved me down, so Ginger shoved her back. But I guess she didn’t tell you that, huh? What happened in gym had nothing to do with what was happening to Ginger, that’s why I didn’t tell you.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>And okay, maybe it’s a lie. Ginger wouldn’t have hurt Trina like that, if things were normal, but Trina still had it coming and it was bigger than what happened in October. Bigger than lycanthropy. “I thought you didn’t talk about my stuff with her,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“I don’t, I covered for you. She saw… I dunno, the marks, the cuts from the attack. I told her you two couldn’t’ve healed that fast, even if you were the ones killing neighbourhood dogs.”</p><p>“She thinks—” Brigitte begins, horror growing in the pit of her stomach.</p><p>“She doesn’t. She doesn’t think it’s you, I talked her down, but jesus, I dunno. Maybe we should get our stories straight, here. In case it keeps coming up.</p><p>“Well, don’t let it.” She’s still holding the cigarette he gave her, but it’s been burning down between her fingers because she finds suddenly that she doesn’t want it at all. </p><p>“I can’t control what she’s thinking, Brigitte. Or anyone else, for that matter.”</p><p>She shifts away from him a little, butting out the cigarette before throwing it into the grass, barely half-smoked and grabs for her bag.</p><p>“Brigitte.”</p><p>“What.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t tell her.”</p><p>“I don’t... really care what you and her are doing, but don’t talk to Trina about me or my sister.” She’s furious; she pushes her camera into her bag and she can feel his eyes on her, but she doesn’t look at him as she steps down and starts to leave. She needs to find Ginger, tell her to be careful, especially if she’s talking to Jason about all this. Jason could talk. To Trina or anyone else. </p><p>“What about the shelves?” Sam calls out when she’s almost at the end of the bleachers. Brigitte stops and turns back, incredulous. </p><p>“Seriously?”</p><p>He shrugs, casual as hell, but then, she can’t see his eyes through his glasses. Something holds her there, at the edge of the bleachers. Finally she says. “If you haven’t fucked everything up, maybe I’ll show.”</p><p>There’s a moment, the space of a few fast heartbeats, and then he says “Fair enough.”</p><p>~</p><p>“I knew it, I fucking knew it,” Ginger says. She’s freaking, Brigitte knew she would. Ginger’s pacing the floor of their bedroom and Brigitte hovers by the door, her fingers still on the deadbolt to their room.</p><p>“You don’t know anything, he has a point. We’ve got to have a story for the scars, or even Pamela’s going to be suspicious.”</p><p>“Like, uh, what, Bee? Are we gonna say a bear attacked me in the woods? Huh? Is that your story?”</p><p>“I don’t know. But we can’t end up telling people different things, that’s going to look suspicious,” Brigitte says, passing their beds to drop her bag in the corner beside hers.</p><p>“You think he doesn’t know what he’s doing, Bee, huh?” Ginger asks. Springs creak, and Brigitte turns back to see that she’s kneeling on Brigitte’s narrow bed. Ginger reaches out and takes Brigitte’s face in her hands, leaning up so they’re level, eye to eye, and for a moment they’re so close that Brigitte can feel the whisper of Ginger’s breath against her mouth. She holds her eyes as Ginger’s hand slides to the back of her neck, soft but holding, and somewhere between them, distance happens, even when Ginger doesn’t let go. “He realized he wasn’t going to get into your pants, and now he’s about to fuck up everything you and me worked for.”</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte’s eyes flicker quickly between her own. “You mean everything that Sam and me worked for.”</p><p>Ginger’s lips part in surprise, her eyebrows raising. “Ohh, so that’s how it is,” she says softly. Brigitte drops her eyes and Ginger lets her go, almost roughly.</p><p>“It’s not like anything,” Brigitte says, softly “Can you focus, please? We need a story.”</p><p>Ginger moves to lean against the headboard of Brigitte’s bed, crossing her ankles, glaring down at her toes. “Okay, how about this. We did it to each other.” Ginger meets her eyes. “Half true.”</p><p>“That’s gonna make us look so fucked,” Brigitte breathes. </p><p>And Ginger holds out her hand, the one with the Pact scars, palm up. “It’s not like we haven’t before, Bee.”</p><p>“That’s different,” Brigitte says. “Kids do stuff like that. Blood oaths. This is like… this looks worse. Like…”</p><p>“Like what?” Ginger asks, and watches Brigitte squirm.</p><p>“Sadistic.”</p><p>“Well we can’t do the bear story,” Ginger says. </p><p>“I dunno,” Brigitte says, very softly. “If they think we did that to each other… what if they separate us? Like… that’s not normal, Ginge.”</p><p>“Then I’ll say I did them. If anyone asks.”</p><p>“Ginger—”</p><p>“I’m serious, lots of girls do it. Anyways… it’s better than being without you.”</p><p>Brigitte looks down, picking at her fingernails before she says whisper-soft: “So then, where were you today, in free period?”</p><p>Ginger looks at her, all wrapped around herself like she needs protection, and sighs. “It’s just— Jason’s not taking the whole… supernatural phenomena well.”</p><p>Brigitte meets Ginger’s eyes, with effort. “So?”</p><p>“So,” Ginger says, “He’s changed, Bee, like, I dunno… he doesn’t fit in anymore. He’s… he can’t just explain that to everyone else, so now he’s like on the outside. Like us. And it’s kinda my fault.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She looks at her, her stomach twisting into these horrible, anxious knots. She thinks <em>Jason cornered me in the janitor’s closet…</em> Her throat is dry, her mouth. She feels sort of sick, and she licks her lips as the words crowd her throat. <em>He’s not like us.</em> But she can’t bring herself to say any of it. In case Ginger doesn’t care what Jason did. In case she thinks that she can just bring Jason into their little circle of two. Instead she asks “Jason knows where you got the marks. What if he tells?”</p><p>“He wouldn’t.”</p><p>“<em>If</em> he does.”</p><p>“Oh, c’mon, Bee, you think anyone’d believe him? They take him off to the fuckin’ funny farm. Trina, too.”</p><p>And Brigitte thinks she’s probably right. She touches the punctures on her arm, and asks “What are we gonna say about mine?”</p><p>“Lemme see,” Ginger says, and Brigitte unzips her hoodie, then frees her arm from the sweater beneath, hooking the fabric over her shoulder. Five smallish circular scars, wrapping around her arm. Most of them are in the back, where Ginger’s claws dug in. She sits down on the edge of the bed with her back to Ginger. She feels Ginger’s fingers settle against her skin as she leans forward to inspect the marks.</p><p>“What about the other one?” Ginger asks.</p><p>“It’s the same,” Brigitte says, but sheds the sweater anyway, goosebumps rising on her arms in just a tank-top. Ginger turns her gently, by the shoulder to see her other arm. The backs of her arms got the worst of it, and the places where the claws met the bone in her shoulder are deeper and darker looking. </p><p>“D’you think they could look like cigarette burns?” Ginger says, and tugs her by the shoulder until Brigitte shifts to lean against the headboard with her.</p><p>She shrugs. “I can say it’s that.” <em>That I did that.</em></p><p>“You could get a tattoo.”</p><p>“No thanks,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“Yeah. Sleeves wouldn’t suit you anyways,” Ginger says, and then. “It’s kind of cool though, isn’t it? Like, we’ve got these marks for all the big things that happen in our lives.”</p><p>And Brigitte opens her hands in her lap to look at the faded pact scars, and the newer, deeper scar they both wear across their palms from when she infected herself and thinks that it would be cooler if every transition didn’t have to hurt so much. But…</p><p>“Yeah,” she says.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Saturday, she shows.</p><p>He’s smoking a joint outside, trying to get some morning sunlight before it fades into one of those endless grey November afternoons that have the tendency to make him depressed. And then there she is, showing up with her hair all tangled in her scarf and… a level.</p><p>“Aw, for me?” Sam teases, like its flowers instead.</p><p>“I didn’t know if you had one.”</p><p>“I don’t,” he says. God, the relief he feels is better than the high. He kind of thought that maybe what happened on the bleachers was it. That they were done, but here she is.</p><p>She shows on Sunday, too, even though it’s been quieter between them. They get the shelves up (and level), and then she helps move all the plants into place, and that’s it. Sam’s already added the hydroponics pump, and so all he has to do is add the seeded plants and the mineral nutrient solution, flick on the lower lights, and that’s it. They’re done.</p><p>“Wow, jesus,” he says, as they stand together looking at their work. The sun set an hour ago and he can hear the wind rattling the tarps over the greenhouses up front, promising a storm. “That’s pretty solid work.”</p><p>“Maybe we should’ve stained the wood,” Brigitte says. “If it gets wet…”</p><p>“Nah,” Sam says. “I’m careful. Plus, it’s teak, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”</p><p>Brigitte nods, chewing her lip.</p><p>“Thanks,” Sam tells her. “Really. I couldn’t have done it without you.”</p><p>She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes find his for the space of a heartbeat, acknowledging. </p><p>“Want me to drive you home?” Sam asks her, already heading to the table to get his car keys. “It sounds like it’s getting nasty out there.”</p><p>“We’re saying,” Brigitte blurts out, louder than usual like she’s had to force it past some barrier inside herself. When he stops and turns back, she continues, softer. “We’re saying it’s self-inflicted. The marks from the attack. I just though you should know, since… you were right. The other day, on the bleachers.”</p><p>He thinks, maybe, it’s an apology, but he isn’t sure. “Okay. Yeah,” he says.</p><p>She looks like she wants to say something else, and he waits, but she doesn’t, or can’t. After a moment she just breaks her stillness and pulls on her jacket, and they go.</p><p>As Sam pulls into her street, he has the sense of something ending. Because now what? Now that the cure’s been made, twice, and the hydroponics table’s been set up, and the shelves are in place, what do they have left? There’s really no reason to see each other, no reason for her to stop by, because he isn’t sure if they’re friends, really, or just… convenient acquaintances. Maybe it’s supposed to go that way, he doesn’t know. They’re quiet on the way, and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been trying to think of something else — just one more thing to spend time together — but he comes up empty, and so the last thing he says to her before she pushes her door open to the icy wind outside is “Guess I’ll see you around,” and ‘around’ sounds so much bleaker than ‘tomorrow.’</p><p>Brigitte says “Okay.”</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>“Well, why can’t I do coaching for community involvement?” </p><p>“I told you, already,” her homeroom teacher says, as he arranges all these folders on his desk. “Those slots have already been filled.”</p><p>“But, Miss Sykes said I—”</p><p>“There’s nothing I can do, Trina, I’m sorry.”</p><p>Trina thinks <em>You could at least look at me when you’re speaking to me</em>, but she holds her tongue, and feels it wrap hotly around her ribs instead. She arranges her face into a smile and says “Okay, well, thanks anyway,” and somehow it doesn’t even sound sarcastic. She wonders what he’d possibly thought of to do in the span of five minutes between this moment and the final bell of the day, and knows that it’s just a lazy excuse.</p><p>She goes to find Miss Sykes next, and knows that all this is going to miss the bus home and fuck, she didn’t bring proper winter boots, of course.</p><p>Miss Sykes is still in her office by the gym, and her door’s open, but Trina knocks anyway and has to reiterate her whole story again.”</p><p>“Those slots are filled already,” Miss Sykes says.</p><p>“Yes, but you said I could.”</p><p>“Well you didn’t sign up, Trina…”</p><p>“Right, because I thought we agreed.”</p><p>“Well, it’s important to get things in writing,” Miss Sykes says, almost offhand and Trina feels the breath in her lungs pushed out, like she’s winded. She has to take a second. “Okay,” she finally says, into the awkward silence. “But… I need it for my report card. For the sports scholarship, remember, we discussed—”</p><p>“There’s only so many placements for these things, Trina… maybe next year, okay?”</p><p>Trina meets her eyes. “Can I get it in writing?” she asks.</p><p>Miss Sykes laughs in that way adults sometimes do. Like she’s insignificant, an annoyance. “I’ll speak to the principal.”</p><p>“Okay, thanks,” she hears herself say, and turns to leave. At the door she stops and says “Who got it?”</p><p>“I’m sorry?”</p><p>“Who signed up?”</p><p>“Oh, um…” Miss Sykes clicks through some windows on her computer and says “Tim and Cal. You know, Trina, maybe you could ask if one of them will switch with you. I’m sure they’d understand.”</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>“Jesus,” Ginger says, “She’s really losing it.”</p><p>Whatever conversation was happening over with Jason’s group has turned into a straight-up argument. The morning bell hasn’t even rung yet. Beside her, Brigitte glances through her hair in the direction Trina’s shouting is coming from. She’s genuinely upset. It’s that rage-fuelled helplessness that happens when whatever injustice you’re facing can’t be fully expressed. When you have nowhere to put it. Ginger knows that feeling. She also knows how it feels to release it, to scream and tear and break things. She’s almost jealous of Trina, for a moment, even though she looks like a mess, her face red and tears streaking her cheeks.</p><p>“Think someone cheated on her?” Ginger asks.</p><p>Brigitte shrugs and looks away. “I don’t really care.”</p><p>“Yeah, you wouldn’t get it,” Ginger says, eyes still on Trina. “What that feels like.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte feels something like it, now. White-hot anger, rushing from the centre of her chest to the very tips of her fingers. It’s just that she hasn’t thrown a tantrum since she was little. It’s just easier to exist when no one’s looking, and Pamela’s platitudes always missed the mark. Henry’s silences were a little easier to take. She thinks <em>Because you always need to be the centre of attention</em>, and it’s mean, but she thinks she means it. But she doesn’t say things like that to Ginger, even if she thinks them. That’s just the way it works. Ginger’s the sun and Brigitte’s just space-matter. Small and insignificant. It’s always been like that. </p><p>“Is she even with anyone?” Brigitte asks instead, changing the subject back to something safer.</p><p>Ginger snorts. “Apparently not anymore.”</p><p>The bell rings and Trina whirls away from her group to go in, but she has to pass Brigitte and Ginger on her way. She doesn’t even see them. The next thing she knows, Jason’s there, and Ginger’s brightened, and Brigitte can’t do anything but glare at the ground and pretend to be invisible, since Jason’s pretending she is. And she thinks that she does get it, what Trina’s anger feels like. What Ginger’s feels like. Because Brigitte thinks it's so unfair that this is how it goes: that her and Ginger’s breaking painfully apart is simultaneously so fucking innocuous, so mundane, but also so fucking painful, like a botched surgery on conjoined twins, tearing them apart where they’re supposed to be connected. She feels like it should have gone out another way — something sharp and bitter, like a knife to the ribs. Instead it just leaves her feeling blown empty, blasted by a dry wind. She's a desert inside and Ginger feels like a mirage she knows now, isn't real or, at least, she'll never reach it. Ginger walks into school at Jason’s side and leaves Brigitte behind, because now he’s taking her away at school, too. And Brigitte swallows her outage down, like she always does. She sits in class and listens quietly while Ginger and Jason pass a note back and forth beside her. She twists ever so slightly away from them both and her gaze lands two rows across, where Trina’s doing the same. Taking page after page of notes like nothing’s wrong. Like nothing’s screaming inside of her.</p><p>~</p><p>Tuesdays, Brigitte has a free after lunch where Ginger has art class. Normally, she goes with her. The teacher lets her sit in the corner and look at the photography books that aren’t allowed to be in the school library. They’re these heavy volumes of after-death photography and Hidden Mothers in the Victorian era, and all sorts of other strange things. Photographs of mediums spitting up ectoplasm during séances, photographs of supposed ghosts. Brigitte knows it’s all literally smoke and mirrors — tricks. She thinks that they’re clever, though, these strange women who sat at darkened tables and clasped the hands of those seeking to contact the dead. Because a spirit could tell you anything — it could have an opinion that was treasonous, or speak where women were expected to be silent. Brigitte thinks that if people back then had known that the mediums weren’t so much a channel for spirits, as they were a way for women to speak their own thoughts, they’d find it so much scarier than ghosts.</p><p>She doesn’t go to art today, though. She wants to be alone, and she doesn’t. She wants to be with Ginger like it was before, but if she can’t have that, then she doesn’t want to hang around in art class like she has nothing better to do.</p><p>Except she doesn’t really. Have anything better to do. It’s too cold to go out for a cigarette so she wanders in the general direction of the library. There’s a class in there, doing a research project and so Brigitte steps quickly into the first row of books and keeps them between her and the other students as she navigates slowly towards a quiet corner of the floor in the back of the room, since most of the tables are taken.</p><p>She starts her homework, using her Biology textbook as a desk against her knees, and for the most part, her thoughts filter out the sounds around her. She’s hardwired to recognize certain voices as threats, though, and Tim’s floats to her first. They’re on the other side of the row of books she’s seated next to. </p><p>“She’s pissed because Cal and me took the sports slots. Like it was between that and a nursing home, man, no fucking way was I gonna do that.”</p><p>“You can watch TV and stuff, though.” That’s Jessica, Brigitte thinks. She never says anything to her, but she’s one of the Trinas. Trina’s friends.</p><p>“Yeah, and hang around with old people who shit their pants, no thanks. Anyway, she’s fucking psychotic.”</p><p>“Yeah, she’s really losing it. After her dog got eaten, she’s been all kinds’a fucked.”</p><p>“Well maybe she should’n’t have left it out. How stupid d’you have to be?”</p><p>“I know, right?”</p><p>“Anyway, I’m not giving it up, and neither’s Cal. Fuck her, man. She’s a total bitch.”</p><p>“Totally.”</p><p>Brigitte pulls a face, raking her fingers through a tangle in her hair, and thinks if that’s what friends are like, she doesn’t fucking want them.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Sam’s allowed to take the sling off twenty one days into November, and it still hurts like a bitch, but at least he can move it. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean that he’s back on top of work again, and it’s hard not to be pissed that it happened. He’s had to cancel or reschedule a few contracts which really doesn’t look good for him, and he’s going to run out of clients if things keep going this way. Not to mention he starts filling shipments for Poinsettias and Amaryllis the second December hits and it’s easy work, but it some dexterity. Certainly more than he possesses right now. </p><p>About the third time he’s going over his budget to see just how fucked he’s gonna be come February, he uncovers that annual envelope from Bailey Downs School Board. It’s a request to add his business to the list for the students’ community involvement options, and one he usually tosses without opening. He hates people, and he hates the idea of people in his <em>greenhouse</em> even more, but then… it’s an option. Maybe his only option.</p><p>He’s way too late to make the written deadline for a response so he just got in to the school next time he’s driving by and goes in to ask if they’ll add it in. Most of the people in the office know him — they hired him to do groundskeeping after all — and he’s generally liked, and so far he’s managed to keep it that way. </p><p>“Oh, you’re not too late,” the secretary says. “There’s always stragglers who don’t sign up until the very last minute. I’m sure you’ll find someone.”</p><p>~</p><p>Sam thinks if he gets someone, he sure to fuck hopes it’s not someone he sells weed to. A disgustingly wet Tuesday afternoon finds him dealing from his van, turning all the snow to slush until everything’s coated in grey. Christ, Ontario’s depressing.</p><p>He’s going through the motions when a shock of red hair catches his eye. Ginger, with McCardy. He guesses that’s not surprising. Still, he scans the group for Brigitte’s dark hair and doesn’t see her. He takes a couple people’s cash without really looking at them, and waits to catch Ginger’s eyes instead.</p><p>When she finally looks, it’s more of a glare than anything. “Hey,” he says, undeterred, and, when she doesn’t respond “Where’s your sister?”</p><p>“Class,” Ginger says, practically gritting the word out. She puts on a good show, but there’s something uneasy in her face. He knows something about her others don’t. He wonders if Jason knows he knows, but Jason seems the same as ever.</p><p>“Can you tell her I was looking for her?” Sam says.</p><p>“What for?” Ginger asks.</p><p>And Sam doesn’t really have an answer for that. He just wanted… it’s been a while since he’s seen her. “Just wanted to talk,” he says. “You buying?”</p><p>“No,” she says, not bothering to hide her distaste. In him, he thinks, not the weed.</p><p>“All right,” Sam says with a shrug, and pulls out of the parking lot.</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>“Does she get free weed if she lets him pole her?” Cal asks and Ginger feels anger flash through her so fast she almost doesn’t register what she’s doing before she spins around and shoves Cal with all her might. He stumbles back into a couple other guys who laugh. A circle clears around them, people anticipating a fight, but the heat in Ginger’s blood is running cold. Any strength she had before, any power is gone, and that leaves her lungs feeling tight because fuck, the anger’s the <em>same</em>. She’s shaking, she’s so mad. </p><p>“Shut your goddamn mouth, or I’ll punch you in the fucking throat,” she says softly. And her ears are ringing with rage, so she barely hears the taunting on and laughing of the group around them. </p><p>“Fuck off, man,” Jason says, from somewhere to her right.</p><p>“Stay out of it,” she snaps at him. She doesn’t fucking need him to stand up for her. She wheels around and storms away.</p><p>She’s waiting for Brigitte when she comes out of her class and Brigitte takes one look at her face and Ginger can see the anxiety just flood through her. She’s almost sorry, because Brigitte’s always been the one that worries. Usually it’s a drag, but sometimes Ginger feels like she puts strain on Brigitte that Brigitte wouldn’t have to deal with if she wasn’t around. </p><p>“What happened?” Brigitte asks, all trepidation.</p><p>“Nothing, let’s get the fuck out of here.” She has Brigitte’s coat from their locker, and she hands it to her and starts walking. Brigitte catches up. There’s one more period yet, but apparently it’s skippable, because Brigitte doesn’t say anything. They’re all the way across the parking lot before Brigitte reaches for her wrist. “Ginge, what happened?”</p><p>“You know people are talking, right? Those <em>guys</em> are talking about you. You want to be called a slut, now? Huh?”</p><p>Brigitte’s eyes go wide, but it’s that incredulous expression she gets when Ginger’s flying off the handle. Ginger fucking hates it.</p><p>“What?” Brigitte asks, very soft.</p><p>“They want to know if you’re sleeping with your precious Sam for drugs.”</p><p>Several things cross Brigitte’s face, and then she actually laughs, just one short burst of breath, that clouds in the cold air between them. It’s all contempt, though. She meets Ginger’s eyes again and they just hold that connection for a moment before Brigitte rolls her eyes in exasperation. “They’re cretins, who cares.”</p><p>“<em>I</em> care,” Ginger says.</p><p>“Oh, yeah, I forgot that you give a shit what people think about you, now.”</p><p>That cracks against her like a whip, steals her breath. “I give a shit about <em>you</em>!” She snaps, then turns around and walks about two steps before she can’t contain it anymore, and spins back. “He’s looking for you,” she says. “Your <em>pal</em>.”</p><p>Brigitte’s standing with her arms wrapped around herself, her hair all caught up in her coat. She’s looking at Ginger like she doesn’t even know her and that fucking hurts, too. Ginger takes a breath that does nothing to fill her lungs and looks away, digging through her bag for their smokes.</p><p>“Do you think I am?” Brigitte asks, and she sounds hurt. “Is that what you think?”</p><p>“I dunno, Bee, I never see you anymore.”</p><p>“I never see <em>you</em>, you’re always with Jason.”</p><p>“So what, it’s payback?” Ginger asks. </p><p>“No! It’s not… I was just— he’s…”</p><p>“Oh,” Ginger says, like Brigitte’s stammering makes any sense. “Okay. Well… I’m done standing up for you.”</p><p>“I never asked you to.”</p><p>“You need me.”</p><p>“I’ve been doing okay, lately,” Brigitte says and god, it’s like a stab to the heart.</p><p>“Oh, yeah,” Ginger says. “Then great. You were a waste of my time, anyway.” She turns and starts walking again, and Brigitte doesn’t follow her. Ginger doesn’t start crying until she’s out of sight.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte had stood on the sidewalk, shellshocked, with that horrible feeling in her throat and chest like she was going to break apart, and thought about how she couldn’t go home, now. She couldn’t sleep in the same room as her, sit across from her at supper.</p><p>
  <em>You were a waste of my time, anyway.</em>
</p><p>She barely registers where she’s going until she’s got her fingers against the familiar chipping paint of the green house door handle. Sam’s almost right there when she pushes it open, standing beside rows and rows of terracotta pots and a bag of soil. The light’s always different in here, diluted by the clear tarp above. It’s softer, and she takes a breath, maybe her first full one since Ginger had walked away from her.</p><p>“Hey,” Sam says, half-surprised, but he smiles at her, and Brigitte’s still figuring out how to get words around this lump in her throat when he says “Shit, what’s wrong?” and she finally breaks.</p><p>~</p><p>Brigitte <em>hates</em> crying in front of people, but lately everything just overwhelmingly awful, in ways she never thought possible. She’d thought she’d always have Ginger, if nothing else, and that was enough. That was enough to get her through anything, but then the fabric of her world was torn — slit open at the middle like a slaughtered animal, and exposed all this awful, horrifying stuff. More than anything, she wants to be ten again, when she and Ginger were practically joined at the hip, and there were no wolves in the woods, and <em>Out by sixteen</em> felt like a lifetime away.</p><p>She’s cried in front of Sam twice, now, in the space of less than three weeks, and that makes her feel pathetic. It feels like it comes all at once and Sam says “Oh, jesus,” like he’s startled and somewhere in her mind that registers as kind of funny, but she can’t actually feel it. She’s already trying to get a handle on herself. He reaches for her but barely touches her when his fingers brush her shoulder. “Come on,” he says, and they go to his room in the back.</p><p>He says “Sit,” softly, when they come to the couch, and she just does as she’s told. He disappears somewhere else for a moment, but then he’s back with rolling papers and and ashtray. He sets it down on the table and sits down beside her, but doesn’t look at her, just leans over the coffee table to roll a joint and, god, she’s grateful, because she doesn’t feel… watched or burdensome.</p><p>“Sorry,” she manages, when she can finally speak again.</p><p>“Don’t be. Seriously.” He glances her way, but she can’t look at him directly. “You wanna talk about it?”</p><p>“No,” she says, and she thinks she means it, but that… why’d she even come here, then? The answer comes quickly. <em>There was nowhere else to go.</em></p><p>“Sure,” Sam says, “Just… one question. Are you in danger?”</p><p><em>Like lycanthropes</em>, she thinks. “No,”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>“Your arm’s better.”</p><p>“Yeah, well… getting there.”</p><p>And she thinks <em>Sorry</em>, because she feels responsible, even though it wasn’t her that hurt him. It was because of her.</p><p>He eventually gets up to get her a glass of water, offers her a cigarette which she doesn’t take. He smokes the joint beside her, and they’re just quiet, and it’s not awful. She checks her watch after a little while, and realizes that school’s out. She’d normally be getting home soon.</p><p>“Want me to drive you?” Sam asks, and she knows she should say yes, but she doesn’t want to be there. She genuinely doesn’t know if she could handle it.</p><p>“I’m not trying to force you out,” Sam says. “Just… are you hungry? You want to watch something?”</p><p>So that’s what they do. He doesn’t have much by way of food, but there’s tinned soup and crackers and he makes a pot of coffee. There’s nothing on TV so he puts something in the CD player instead that she doesn’t recognize, that sounds different from the hardcore music he listens to in his van. He sort of drifts around, pages through books, does some dishes. She pages through her chemistry textbook idly, and they talk a little, about nothing, really, and outside it gets dark.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Around seven she says “I think Ginger’s pretty much done with me,” and he wonders how long she’s been building up the resolve to say it. </p><p>“She’s your sister,” he says, but it’s not the right thing, because she shrinks into herself even more. </p><p>“I dunno,” she says. “I thought it was the lycanthrope that was changing her, but I think… maybe it wasn’t just that.”</p><p>And Sam can’t pretend to know anything about sisters, or what it’s like to be a teenage girl, but he bets it feels fucking impossible.</p><p>“God, I dunno, everything’s so much harder, all of a sudden,” she continues, barely louder than a whisper, and jesus, he hurts for her, but he doesn’t know what to do to help. She looks sad and small, and exhausted. “Sorry… I’m not trying to be a drag.”</p><p>“You’re not being a drag. Look, I dunno what’s going on, but my door’s always open.” He watches her as she wipes at her cheeks. She’s got shadows under her eyes he doesn’t remember her having when he first met her in October.</p><p>“Maybe I shouldn’t,” she says, “come here.”</p><p>Sam wets his lower lip, narrowing his eyes. “Why’s that?”</p><p>“People are talking,” she says, looking up at him. “They think, I dunno… you could get in trouble, if people get the wrong idea about this.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Sam sighs. “I hate people.”</p><p>“Join the club.”</p><p>“Listen…” Sam says. “I meant what I said; my door’s open to you, whenever. But if people—”</p><p>“They already think I’m a freak.”</p><p>“That’s different, though,” Sam says. “If they start calling you something else… look, Brigitte… I don’t want you to get hurt, especially ‘cause of me.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Slut. </p><p>They can’t even say it, she thinks. But she thinks he understands. He knows there’s whispers of cherry hound floating around, he knows how these rumours go. And Brigitte thinks about how Trina graduated from being the school slut to the school bitch in a handful of hours, and how that transition was rooted in her friends’ mouths, and Brigitte thinks all of it’s so fucking arbitrary anyway. She shouldn’t care. She tells herself she doesn’t, except for some reason it’s always the insinuation that she’d fuck anybody that heats her blood. And besides, he already told her how he feels about her, which came as no surprise since she’s just… her. She’s spent her life in Ginger’s shadow, she knows what beautiful girls look like, and she knows she’s not it.</p><p>“What if you get hurt cause’a me?” she asks. </p><p>Sam gives her this inscrutable look and then says “It won’t come to that.”</p><p>~</p><p>Being in the same place with Sam is strange, she thinks, because she never knows how it’s going to be. Some days they talk until her throat hurts and her thoughts feel electric, and then there’s times, like today, they’re so quiet. It’s never uncomfortable, it’s just that she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be reading the room, doing something different, but he seems perfectly content to do his own thing while she finally does her homework.</p><p>She likes the smell of the greenhouse. It’s heavy but not cloying — all green and close. It kind of reminds her of the mystical shop she and Ginger found on one of their summer trips — back when Pam and Henry did that sort of thing. Back before they were teenagers. </p><p>It had been filled with strange crystals, and glass and velvet, and it smelled like incense. That’s kind of what Sam’s smells like, only it’s like it’s embedded in this place, not so purposefully atmospheric. She can never place it, but it’s heady and soft like cloves.</p><p>She doesn’t realize she falls asleep until he touches her arm. “Hey,” he says, and bites his lip like he’s trying not to smile and she’s <em>mortified</em>, sitting up fast, losing loose-leaf pages. She can’t look at him, just hides beneath her hair and waits for her heartbeat to settle the fuck down.</p><p>“I’m gonna take you home,” he says, and steps away to get his keys, leaving her to gather her things and check her watch and realize that it’s late.</p><p>“I was thinking,” he says, as he pulls off the highway, “maybe we should have a way of contacting each other, instead of, I dunno, running around like it’s the nineteenth century.”</p><p>“They had telephones in the nineteenth century,” Brigitte says, “So.”</p><p>“So, you saying you want my number?” Sam quips and Brigitte gives him a long-suffering look, but guesses she walked into that one. When he pulls over to let her out, he goes through his glove compartment for paper or something, but there’s not much he can use. </p><p>“Just tell me,” Brigitte says, and digs her pen out of her bag.</p><p>She writes his number down along the edge of her palm and half feels like she’s holding too much, there. Too many scars, too many people she… cares about. That thought sends this rush through her and she has to catch her breath.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“Listen,” Sam says, as she caps her pen, “I don’t know if you already signed up for community involvement stuff, for school, but uh… yeah, I just thought, if you wanted to come to the greenhouse, I could use a hand.”</p><p>Her eyes find his, and she’s all surprise. “Oh, I already… Henry lets us do the filing room stuff at his work…”</p><p>“Shit, yeah, no that’s— don’t worry about it.”</p><p>“You should ask Trina,” she says, and that, for sure, catches him off guard.</p><p>“I think she’s looking.” Brigitte frowns and looks out the passenger window, so he can’t see her face so Sam takes a moment to let that settle. Feels kind of like she’s trying to catch him in something, or at least thinks that this might be more than it seems. “I don’t particularly want Trina over at my place,” he says.</p><p>“I just… forget it,” Brigitte says. “She just seems like she’s having a hard time.”</p><p>“Why do you care?”</p><p>“Maybe ‘cause Ginge ate her dog?”</p><p>“So you want <em>me</em> to owe her one,” Sam asks.</p><p>“No,” she counters, “but it feels safe there.”</p><p>“I’ve just spent weeks telling Trina not to come to my place,” Sam says. “So, no. What are you doing?”</p><p>Brigitte sighs. “Why are you avoiding her so hard?”</p><p>“Because… jesus christ,” Sam says, rubbing the back of his neck. “It got fucked up… I dunno, Brigitte. It’s better for both of us when we’re not around each other.”</p><p>“I don’t get how things can change like that,” Brigitte asks. “…Like, how does that happen?”</p><p>And, he thinks, they’ve circled back around to Ginger. <em>How do people fall apart from one another?</em> He isn’t sure he has an answer for her.</p><p>“Um,” she says, interrupting his thoughts. “Thanks for… thanks.”</p><p>“Any time.”</p><p>And she gets out. He watches her slip between her house and the property fence, and go around to the back, which must be how she sneaks in and out. He waits until he can’t see her anymore before he pulls away.</p><p>~</p><p>And like Brigitte’s a fortune teller or something, Sam opens the outer greenhouse door on Saturday morning to Trina, who has a look on her face that’s determined as hell and her arms full of Rottweiler puppy. She’s composed halfway to cold, when she says “I have a favour to ask you,” and Sam’s chest is tight because he still gives a shit about her, even if he doesn’t love her.</p><p>So he says “Hit me,” but he doesn’t step aside to let her in.</p><p>“I need hours for community involvement.”</p><p>“I thought you had that sorted,” he says.</p><p>“So did I. But then the school totally screwed me, and so did my friends. So… I saw you were looking.”</p><p>“Is this a bribe?” Sam asks, pointing to the dog.</p><p>She smiles. “No, this is Charley.”</p><p>“Trina…” Sam says.</p><p>“I won’t even come in. Outer greenhouses only.”</p><p>He meets her eyes, and there’s something else there beneath her calm exterior, something almost desperate, but she’s trying so hard to hide it. “Promise,” she says.</p><p>“This is just going to be a work thing.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“Swear.”</p><p>She crosses her heart as best she can with the dog wriggling to be put down.</p><p>“Fuck, okay,” he says. “Okay.” </p><p>She exhales relief and drops his eyes fast. She kneels to put the dog down and doesn’t look up for a second and she realizes she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s going to cry. This is bigger than them, he realizes, bigger than him, and he remembers what Brigitte said: <em>She just seems like she’s having a hard time. </em></p><p>When she looks up, she’s composed again. “Don’t you want to meet him?”</p><p>He crouches down and lets the puppy playfully bite his hands and wonders what the fuck he’s getting himself into.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>“Where’s dad?” Ginger asks at Saturday night supper. It’s the first thing Brigitte’s heard her say all weekend, even though she’s been home. They’re not speaking to each other. </p><p>“Dad’s not going to be joining us for supper anymore,” Pam says, and both sisters lower their forks simultaneously, eyes on Pamela. “He’s leaving.”</p><p>Ginger cuts a look at Brigitte across the table as Pamela just sits there cutting into her pork chop like she just told them Henry was at the grocery store or something.</p><p>“What?” Brigitte finally asks, and Pamela smiles at her in that totally unconvincing way she does when she’s pretending nothing’s wrong. Brigitte has never once fallen for it, she just pretended to because it was easier.</p><p>“Eat your food before it gets cold, honey,” Pamela says, and Brigitte’s frozen, staring at her incredulously. Ginger, though, puts her fork down and gets up.</p><p>“You weren’t excused young lady,” Pamela calls after her, but Ginger’s already gone.</p><p>Brigitte feels the need to follow her almost like a physical pull, but something holds her there at the table.</p><p>“What happened?” she asks, softly.</p><p>“Oh, you know,” Pamela says, and kind of laughs “Men,” and Brigitte feels like she has to make her lungs expand and contract on purpose to keep them working. “He’s been cheating on me. So I asked him to leave.”</p><p>“But…” Brigitte has to close her eyes for a minute.</p><p>“Honestly, I should have expected this,” Pamela continues. “But it will be just us girls, now. Won’t that be nice? I’ll get a little office job somewhere. We’ll be fine.”</p><p>“But, what—” Brigitte hears herself say, again, with no clear idea where she’s going with it.</p><p>“Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll be better this way. None of this is your fault.”</p><p>Silence falls — this horrible, deafening silence. Her ears are ringing. “I should go find Ginger,” Brigitte says, and she flees.</p><p>Behind her, Pamela sets her napkin down and covers her face with her hands.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Community involvement began in 1999 and is still a graduation requirement in Ontario high schools. Students must complete 40 hours of unpaid work within their communities during their time in secondary school.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. helleborus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>“So I guess, so much for volunteering at Henry’s work, huh?” Ginger says, later. They’re downstairs again, candles lit all around, and it feels almost normal, except their dad’s gone, and Brigitte thinks they’re kind of still fighting, and there isn’t a sound from above. Normally Pam’s doing dishes, but it’s radio silence.</p><p>She doesn’t really know what to say to that. She feels like she never really knows what to say anymore. “You don’t think he’d let us?”</p><p>Ginger shrugs. “Who knows. S’far as I see it, he’s off scot-free.”</p><p>Brigitte furrows her brow a little. “Wonder who it was,” she says, softly.</p><p>Ginger scoffs. “Who cares?”</p><p>“Don’t you?” Brigitte asks, but Ginger just gives her a look and then rolls her eyes. “Why didn’t they just get divorced?” Brigitte mutters. </p><p>“‘Cause he’s a coward,” Ginger says, and Brigitte pulls her sweater tighter. It’s already getting cold down here. They’ll need to pull out the warmer blankets soon. “It’s like… like he doesn’t know what to do with any of us. I'unno. It was probably gonna happen eventually.”</p><p>“D’you think we’ll have to move?”</p><p>Ginger looks up fast, like she hadn’t considered this. “You think?”</p><p>“I dunno. How much’d Henry’s job pay him?”</p><p>“Yeah, and when was the last time Pam went to work?” Brigitte watches Ginger as the thought begins to sink in. “Fuck,” Ginger says. “Well… we’ll blow, right? Bee? We’ll fucking blow. Right? Like, I’m not gonna change schools, now. If we end up in a two bedroom apartment with <em>Pamela</em>, we…”</p><p><em>We lose this,</em> Brigitte thinks, her eyes flickering around their room, their sanctuary. They grew up here. It’s theirs in a way someplace else could never be. And her agreement sits in her mouth, ready, always, for Ginger, but the echo in her head is louder. The one that says <em>You were a waste of my time, anyway.</em> Brigitte takes a deep breath, but all of her words lodge in her throat. “Where will we go?” she finally asks.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Ginger says. “When has that ever mattered?”</p><p>Brigitte finally meet’s her eyes and says, “You know if you go, I go.”</p><p>Ginger takes a deep breath. “Together forever?”</p><p>And it means forgiveness. It means <em>she’s</em> forgiven for being a waste of Ginger’s time, so Brigitte nods, but she doesn’t say it back.</p><p>~</p><p>Neither of them finished supper, so Brigitte eventually goes upstairs to get something for them to eat. The clock on the stove reads 11:53, and Brigitte follows the glowing numbers through the darkened kitchen to switch the stove-head light on. The dishes still aren’t done. Everything from supper’s still on the table, including their plates and this horribly unsettled feeling creeps through her chest because it’s like a horror movie. Like <em>Where did everyone go so quickly? Why did they just leave everything…?</em> And for a brief moment she hates Henry, because she so desperately wants things to go back to normal, and why’d he have to leave, now? Couldn’t he have waited until she caught her breath from October?</p><p>Brigitte lingers there at the stove in the half-dark, and then she makes up her mind. She collected everything from the table, scrapes the plates into the garbage, and then fills up the sink and rolls up her sleeves.</p><p>Ginger comes up to find her eventually. Dries the dishes Brigitte’s put in the rack. They’re being as quiet as they can, because neither of them wants Pamela in here. </p><p>“Doesn’t seem fair that he gets to fuck off, and we’re all left cleaning up the mess,” Ginger mutters.</p><p>And Brigitte’s inclined to agree.</p><p>~</p><p>Ginger turns sixteen in November, and she doesn’t even spend her birthday at home. She’s out, again, with Jason probably, and Brigitte is left at home with Pamela and strawberry cake and this horrible feeling in her chest like something’s pulling on her ribs from the inside until she wishes they’d just crack to relieve the pressure. Brigitte leaves the gift she made for her on her pillow, and it’s gone by morning, and they don’t talk about any of it. </p><p>And then, suddenly, it’s the first of December, and there’s snow on the ground that’s decided to stay, and she and Ginger both still usually end up going home after school as their home life warps around them. Pamela is doing her best to seem like things are normal. They still sit around the dinner table, with Henry’s chair empty, and the conversation is as grueling as ever, except now all of Pam’s attention is directed to them, and none of it to Henry. They don’t talk about it. Not about <em>it</em>, but Pam talks about the future like there’s a plan, like they’re <em>friends</em> or something. She keeps saying ‘just us girls,’ and Brigitte can’t even look at Ginger anymore, when Pam says it, because it feels worse every time. They’re not friends, they’re never <em>going</em> to be friends, but Brigitte’s starting to realize that Pam herself is just as isolated as they are. Except she doesn’t have a sister to soften the harsh reality of the world. She doesn’t even have Henry, and Brigitte is starting to feel sorry for her in a way that’s different from the way she felt sorry for her before — for being one of the normals. She feels sorry for her in a way that, somewhere between the unwashed dishes and Pam’s tremulous insistence that everything will be fine, Brigitte’s started to realize that she’s not just their mom, but that she’s a <em>person</em>.</p><p>~</p><p>She’s beginning to feel like every time she shows up at Sam’s, she has a problem. It’s been a while though, this time, since she’s seen him. He hasn’t been around school lately, or at least she hasn’t noticed. She’s caught something, like she always does once winter’s taken hold, and in spite of the fact that she feels like death walking she winds up at the greenhouses on a Friday evening instead of going home and crawling into bed. </p><p>Sam’s busy, he’s got papers and books all over his desk in his room, and this list he’s started that says <em>Alternatives to Vermiculite/Perlite</em>, but he lets her in anyway, and tries to shake off the distraction clinging to him, but she can see it all over his face, the way he keeps touching the books. She thinks I <em>should</em> go, but she doesn’t. She came here to ask him something anyway, only the trouble is, she doesn’t know how to get started. Telling the truth, she doesn't even know how much is hers to tell, but she has to start somewhere. “My dad left,” she says, and as always, it’s strange to call him that, but it feels more detached, less personal, somehow, than calling him by his name, than saying <em>Henry left</em>. That’s someone she knew, someone she sat beside at supper. Her dad, Brigitte thinks, left a long time ago, and left something like a shell of himself in his stead. Henry is different from her dad — who bought her her camera, who helped them bring things down to the basement room. Henry came later, only she’s not entirely sure when.</p><p>Sam looks up at her from the chair at his desk, and for the first time she has his full attention, and he doesn’t say anything for a second. He doesn’t know how to take it. He’s trying to read her, and instinctively she tries to become unreadable. She looks down, feels the press of the edge of the table against her spine, feels the soft knock of her rings against wood as she curls her fingers around the edge. </p><p>“Oh,” he finally says. “Shit?” It’s a question. </p><p>“I guess,” she shrugs. “Guess counselling didn’t work,” she adds, dryly, and she can’t see him through her hair, but she hears the soft exhale through his nose.</p><p>“So what’s that mean?” Sam asks.</p><p>“It means… I dunno.” It means she can’t do her community hours at his work. That’s why she’s here, whys she’s come, to ask for the work at the greenhouse, but suddenly her mind is flooded with what it means, and she has to stop, half overwhelmed. It means Pamela getting a job for the first time in Brigitte’s memory. It means their house feels the same but she isn't sure if it’s supposed to. It means what if they have to move? Leave their basement bedroom, leave <em>school</em>, where it's terrible but at least it’s the devil she knows. Leave…oh, leave the greenhouse and—</p><p>She has to stop thinking. She furrows her brow and swallows. Her throat fucking hurts. “We went to see him, at his work. Ginge and me. Just to sort of… I mean we still have to do community involvement and he just wasn’t at home, one night, like... that’s how it started. He wasn't at supper. So we went, without Pam knowing and he met us in the lobby. He kept looking around like he was afraid someone was gonna see us talking, and I was thinking, like… he’s ashamed of us. Only it wasn’t us… it was more… his association with us. Maybe she doesn’t even know he’s got a family. The person he left us for.”</p><p>Sam doesn’t say anything, but he’s watching her, and she finally gets the guts to look up at him and she gets this rush, and she doesn’t know if it’s the good or bad kind. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”</p><p>And Sam smiles at her, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Why should you?”</p><p>“Because,” — she coughs, and it’s dry and heavy in her chest, that exhaustive cough you get before all the crap in your lungs loosens up — “you don’t care.”</p><p>“You’re funny,” he says, and stands up to put the kettle on. </p><p>With his back to her, it’s easier to talk to him honestly like this. “I just meant, you don’t care about this stuff.”</p><p>“You’re wrong,” he says, “And Brigitte isn’t entirely sure what to do with that. </p><p>He makes her tea with honey in it. Says “If it were me, I’d put rye in it, but uh—”</p><p>“That sounds horrible.”</p><p>He laughs softly and drinks his black even though he normally adds milk and that’s something she knows, now, she realizes, and she’s suddenly not sure what to do with that information, so she sets it aside. Hers is just shy of sweet, but it soothes her throat a little and she’s grateful for that. She hates the taste of cough drops, and they usually cut her tongue. “I came to ask, um… if you still need help at the greenhouse. For my community stuff.”</p><p>And Sam’s quiet. He doesn’t look at her and he doesn’t move, and she realizes that he’s somewhere else with this now. On a different page than they were when they last talked, and he’s been waiting for her to ask. “Yeah, I… Trina’s… I asked her, like you said. Or, I didn’t ask, she… she asked.”</p><p>“…Oh. Okay.” she says, and beneath the curtain of her hair, bites her lip hard for a second, tastes bergamot and honey. Fuck, it hits harder than she thought it would, Trina coming here, and for a second she feels almost dizzy. She squeezes her eyes shut, blinks them open.</p><p>“Hers fell through. Her original plan. Jesus, but— I guess yours did, too, huh?”</p><p>She shrugs, holds the mug perhaps a little too tightly, and she can’t look up.</p><p>“There’s still a spot. For someone else,” Sam says.</p><p>“Yeah, no way.” Brigitte can’t imagine willingly being in the same room as Trina Sinclair. “I’ll ask somewhere else.”</p><p>“I mean, you could alternate days.”</p><p>“It’s okay, Sam.”</p><p>“You told me to ask her.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“And in the end, she asked me. Why do I feel like I’m… doing something wrong here?”</p><p>“You’re not,” she says, looking up. “Why <em>do</em> you?”</p><p>He holds her eyes, and the connection lasts a moment too long. Longer. She can feel her heartbeat. “I dunno,” Sam says, a little too soft. “You know I want… I like having you here. Sign up, be here… you don’t have to see her. I can make sure you don’t.”</p><p>“I just thought… you said it was better when you weren’t around each other.”</p><p>“It is,” Sam says. “But I owe her one.”</p><p>“Why’s that?” Brigitte asks, finding his gaze and holding it. For a moment, he lets her.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>It’s hard to look away, because she so rarely looks at him, but it’s hard to look at her, too. Her eyes look dark in the lamplight. He thinks he could lie to her, just make something plausible, up, but in the end he finds he can’t. He doesn’t want to. “I should’ve treated her better,” he says, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it.</p><p>She looks away first, and he finds he has to fill his lungs, like he’d forgotten to breathe just then, in that moment. “Anyway, Brigitte,” he says, “if you need somewhere to fill your hours… I’d rather it be you than anyone.” She looks at him sharply, wide, spooked eyes — halfway to distrusting. <em>Why?</em> he can see the question on her lips, but she doesn’t get it out. “I know you can do the work,” he tells her. “Look, c’mere.”</p><p>He gets up from the desk and slips around her, heads to the curtained off little closet where the pot is growing. She follows, and he pulls the clear vinyl aside for her so she can see. The seedlings he’d put in are growing. “I had to add an air pump, make sure the roots were getting oxygen, but um… otherwise…”</p><p>“They’re growing so fast…”</p><p>“Yeah. They’re still far from mature, but — yeah. I’m impressed. Thanks to you, or I probably would’n’t’ve done it.”</p><p>Brigitte shifts her weight from foot to foot, wrapping her arms around herself. “I don’t know anything about plants,” she says, and Sam lets the curtains fall back across the pot and meets her eyes. </p><p>“I’ll teach you,” he says, and lets her search his face. Christ, he feels like she sees him better than anyone has, and he watches her bite down on a hangnail as she turns to look back towards the rest of the greenhouse. </p><p>“Let me think about it,” she says, finally.</p><p>“Sure,” he tells her. “Whatever you want. I’ll hold the spot for you.”</p><p>“And what if I can’t take it?”</p><p>“Then I’ll find someone else. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just… I’ll keep it for you, until you say otherwise. Okay?”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She walks home, because Sam seemed busy, and surprisingly it’s Ginger she finds in the kitchen. She’s sitting on the counter beside the sink eating a sandwich. “Where’s Pam?” she asks, and Ginger shrugs.</p><p>“I dunno, she wasn’t here when I got back. Groceries maybe? Maybe she’s actually found that office job. You want?” she asks, and pushes the plate with the other half of the sandwich Brigitte’s way, and Brigitte shrugs, but she wanders into the kitchen to lean her hip against the counter beside Ginger’s knee.</p><p>“Where were you?” Ginger asks. “I waited for you, but… figured since you were sick and had a free last, you’d come home.”</p><p>“Greenhouses,” Brigitte says. “I wanted to see if there were any community involvement hours.” She can’t say his name. Lately she’s taken to talking to Ginger about the greenhouses in passive voice. No Sam, just the building alone, like it’s sentient somehow, other than green growing things, and could tell her whether or not there was.</p><p>“And?” </p><p>Brigitte nods, then meets Ginger’s eyes. “Yeah. But only one spot.”</p><p>Ginger laughs and rolls her eyes. “Of course.”</p><p>“What.”</p><p>“I mean… well, what, Bee? He’s just trying to get you there alone.”</p><p>Brigitte furrows her brow, bites down on the inside of her cheek to keep herself in check. She sure as hell isn’t going to tell Ginger about Trina being there. “I’m always there alone. It’s not like that,” she says, again, for the ten millionth time. And there’ll be customers.”</p><p>“Ew.”</p><p>And Brigitte, who has somehow not thought of this until this moment, gets a horrible sick twist in her gut. She hates dealing with people, with strangers, and what if Sam needs her to do that? Maybe she won’t take it. She’s already been thinking she shouldn’t because what will Ginger do? What will <em>she</em> do without Ginger?</p><p><em>But</em>, she thinks, <em>I have been without her already.</em> And she’s managed to keep her head above. Not drowning. But she’s getting tired. She’s not used to being the only thing between herself and the world. Usually she can slip her shoulder behind Ginger’s and hide. She could let Ginger do the talking, let other people look at Ginger until Brigitte just blended into the background. She can’t do that without her, and no amount of hiding behind her hair, and layers and layers of blacks and dark greens, and her refusal to make eye contact is going to save her from the fact that she has to interact with the world, and she doesn’t know how. Doesn’t even know if she wants to.</p><p>“You gonna take it?” Ginger asks.</p><p>Brigitte looks up at her. “What will you do?” she asks.</p><p>Ginger looks at her a moment too long and if Brigitte half-wanted the sandwich a second ago, she doesn’t now. “I won’t,” she says.</p><p>“But—” Brigitte begins.</p><p>“But you need it to graduate,” Ginger says, in that stupid girly voice she’s using when she mocks her. “Blah blah blah. What if I’m dead before then?”</p><p>And there’s this sound in her ears like a kettle screaming, boiling dry. Brigitte tries to take a breath and can’t, quite. “Ginger—”</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte’s looking at her all tension and terror and, Ginger thinks, they used to be in this together and now… now she casts it out there, testing the waters, and Brigitte — Bee, the master of thinking up ways for them to die, the death photographer, the beautiful corpse… Bee’s not going to bite. And Ginger thinks that something’s broken between them, but she doesn’t know what, just that it fucking hurts <em>so much</em>.</p><p>“Relax, I was just— jesus. I was kidding.”</p><p>“— you can’t. You can’t just leave.”</p><p>“It’s what we were gonna do.”</p><p>“No, we were gonna get out,” Brigitte says. “<em>Out by sixteen</em>, Ginger, remember?”</p><p>“And go where, Bee? How’s anywhere else even gonna be any different than here?”</p><p>“Well, we don’t know, we’ve never—”</p><p>“Fuckssake.”</p><p>“—it could be. We should at least try.”</p><p>“Well,” Ginger says. I’m already sixteen, so… you’ve got ten more months to figure it out.”</p><p>And Brigitte’s expression quickly clouds over with anger. “Why is it just me?”</p><p>“Because you don’t like my plan,”</p><p>“Your plan to just die?”</p><p>“I don’t see you comin’ up with any fantastic ideas.”</p><p>“The pact was for both of us,” Brigitte snaps, suddenly, fuelled through her anxiousness by fear, channeling it out as anger. Ginger’s fingers curl around the edge of the counter and she just looks at her. Can’t look away. “You can’t just fucking do it without me.”</p><p>“Would you?” Ginger asks. “Do it?”</p><p>Brigitte’s eyes move between Ginger’s, and for a moment Ginger’s clinging to hope but then Brigitte whispers. “No. I’m not dying. I’m not.”</p><p>Ginger feels like she’s been hit by a fucking train. She wants to throw the plate against the wall, she wants to fucking hit her, and scream and scream and scream. Instead she gets as quiet as Brigitte and asks, “You’re just gonna break the pact?”</p><p>“No, I’d go anywhere with you,” Brigitte says, and Ginger’s breath quivers free from her lungs, all on its own. Her whole body is shaking. “We’ll find a way out before next September,” Brigitte tells her.</p><p>“Well that’s the only way, then,” Ginger tells her. “‘Cause I’m not living in this place a fucking second longer than I have to. Move,” she says, and pushes Brigitte’s shoulder back a little harder than she has to, so that she can hop down from the counter. She hears Brigitte follow her down the basement steps.</p><p>“Where are you going?”</p><p>“Out. You should’ve come home earlier. Then we could hang, but… you were busy, I guess.”</p><p>And Brigitte doesn’t say anything, but it doesn’t feel like like it normally does. Like she’s won and lost something at once. Ginger gets her coat and Brigitte doesn’t stop her.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte tries to remember the last time she saw her parents hug or hold hands and she can’t, and she wonders when that happened. She wonders who stopped trying first, and whether that’s even Pamela’s responsibility. Or Henry’s.</p><p><em>That’s not gonna happen to us, right?</em> she wonders, but she can’t even ask Ginger because Ginger’s out, away from her. Just like Brigitte was out, away from Ginger this afternoon.</p><p>She goes back upstairs when she hears Pam’s car in the driveway and cleans up the remains of Ginger’s sandwich before she comes in. Then she helps Pam bring in the groceries and put them away, and tries as casually as possible to shrug off Ginger’s absence when she’s asked and Pamela smiles at her and says “I’m so glad the two of you are learning to do things on your own. Taking time and space away is… well it’s just so important,” she says, and Brigitte thinks that that probably has nothing to do with her and Ginger, and everything to do with Henry, but she doesn’t say anything. </p><p>For the first time in Brigitte’s life, Pam says they should order a pizza, even though it’s not a Friday night or even anyone’s birthday so she just shrugs and says okay. </p><p>“Less dishes,” Pam says, like that’s the most exciting prospect in the world, and Brigitte really, really doesn’t understand adults, but her mom is even harder than others. and it’s strange, but… there’s something about being alone with Pamela — alone without Henry or Ginger or noise from the car radio — that just makes her seem so much more real. Strange, totally out of Brigitte’s world, but real. Like a real person. They eat it in the living room without really talking. Brigitte takes possession of the coffee table, sitting on the floor with her homework, and Pamela watches one of those old movies on cable and for the first time, maybe ever, Brigitte feels better here than she does thinking of being downstairs alone, without Ginger. When was the last time their house felt like home, and not just their bedroom? She wonders. When was the last time she felt like she could take up space in a place that wasn’t just theirs — hers and Ginger’s?</p><p>And she honestly can’t remember.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>The phone rings a couple days later, on a Friday evening just as he’s coming in from shovelling the drive so he can actually get out tomorrow to do some deliveries. It’s after business hours, so Sam lets it ring for a little while as he unlaces his boots and sheds his coat, kind of hoping that they’ll hang up, but they don’t. </p><p>He grabs it one ring before the machine picks up, hooks the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he digs for his lighter, and says “County Regreening,” through the cigarette he’s just placed between his lips.</p><p>“Hey.”</p><p>It takes him a second to place the voice, and then he takes the cigarette out fast, takes hold of the phone properly. “Hey. Brigitte, what’s up.”</p><p>“I want to take it. The hours at the greenhouse.”</p><p>“It’s yours, then.”</p><p>There’s a pause, uncertain, but not quite long enough to be awkward, because he breaks it at the same time as she tries to, and then they’re plunged into another depthless silence as they both wait for the other to continue.</p><p>“Sorry. Okay,” Brigitte says. “Um… so…”</p><p>“So how do you feel about hellebore?” </p><p>“What is that?” Brigitte asks, with some trepidation.</p><p>“Winter roses. I’ve got to deliver about a hundred of them tomorrow morning, so… if you wanna come for a drive.”</p><p>“Do I have to talk to people?”</p><p>“I mean, I was hoping me, but uh,” Sam says, and he can’t quite keep the laughter out of his voice.</p><p>“…That’s acceptable,” she says, and there’s something in it. The barest hint of humour. It’s all in her eyes, when he can look at her, but he likes this — likes that he can hear it, in spite of its subtlety.</p><p>“Okay,” Sam says. “Then I’ll see you. I’m leaving at nine.”</p><p>“I’ll be there by then.”</p><p>“Or I could pick you up at yours?”</p><p>~</p><p>She’s waiting for him the next morning, because he’s barely pulled up to the house before the front door opens and she slips out. She’s so dark against the snow, and she slips slightly on the driveway which hasn’t been shoveled, just has tracks from the van through the snow that are slick now.</p><p>“Treacherous,” he says, instead of hello, when she opens the door and climbs in.</p><p>“Kind of.”</p><p>They’re driving as far as two counties over, so they won’t be done until probably three or four in the afternoon, but she seems perfectly content to wait. She follows him out at the first place, and around to the back of the van where he’s packed the flowers in crates and boxes for deliveries. “So this is hellebore,” Sam says. They’re delicate looking flowers, white with the softest pink edges. “Not popular like poinsettias, but lots of restaurants like them and they pay well, so.” Sam shrugs and pulls a crate towards him so he can carry it in.</p><p>“Your arm,” Brigitte says. </p><p>“It’s fine, they’re not heavy. Plastic pots.”</p><p>He takes a step towards the building and she reaches out to touch a crate. Already her fingers look cold in the morning chill. “You wanna come?” he asks her. “You can sit in the van if you don’t wanna talk to people.”</p><p>“I’ll help,” she says, so he tells her ‘grab one,’ and she follows him in. Sam — County Regreening, greenhouse owner Sam — is different from how he normally is when he’s with her, and different again from the guy that sells pot in the high school parking lot. He knows these people, he chats with them about stuff, and she thinks that he’s not really her world, either. Like Pamela’s not, or Jason, or Trina. He’s in this world — this adult world where you talk about work and kids and traffic. It’s half like watching actors perform a play, and Brigitte hovers back a ways and doesn’t engage, and most of the people don’t talk to her either.</p><p>“Is that what you talk about?” Brigitte asks on their way to the next place. “Like, what, you hit twenty-one and then you’re all— Polite Conversation.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Sam says. “You have no idea how often I think about this. I think it’s like— safe topics. Like a script. No one fucking knows how to talk to anybody, and so you just follow the script, and that’s how humans interact.”</p><p>“That’s not how it is for me.”</p><p>“Never get a customer service job, then,” Sam tells her. “I hate it… the script, I mean. And the customers.”</p><p>“Then why do it?”</p><p>“I dunno. Because that’s how I get paid. Because I can’t walk into a nice restaurant like that one and say ‘Hey, capitalism’s slowly killing us all, but I really appreciate the cash you just gave me for these flowers so that I can make sure I’ve still got electricity and something to eat next month. How’s the wife?”</p><p>Brigitte smiles. “Why not? You should try it.”</p><p>Sam laughs, just imaging it. “Yeah. You haven’t even been here an hour and you're already trying to sabotage my business.”</p><p>“Does it just start?” Brigitte asks. “Do I get a warning signal before I have to start having Polite Conversation? Asking about people’s kids I don’t care about?”</p><p>“Huh. Starts with working, probably,” Sam says. “That’s how they crush any iota of personality you might have out of you. Between that and the suburbs.”</p><p>“You still have personality,” she says, softly.</p><p>“You mean in between my Polite Conversation?”</p><p>“No, I mean, when you’re just you. When you're with me. We’re talking right now about how capitalism slowly kills us all. And about… you know. Lycanthropy.”</p><p>“Yeah well… you’re different, I don’t know.” He fiddles with the windshield wipers, trying to get some of the winter grit off of his windshield. “Like, being with you’s kinda like being alone, you know? That sounds wrong, but… it’s like being in my own head. Like I don’t have to… have a filter. I don’t have to put up a front.”</p><p>She’s looking at him, but he doesn't look away from the road. Suddenly he’s glad to have the excuse of driving. She says “Thanks,” with this soft sincerity, and somehow he didn't expect that.</p><p>“I mean, I get what that feels like, kind of. Like with Ginger. She’s the only person who doesn’t think I’m too weird.”</p><p>“I like that you’re weird.”</p><p>“Yeah… I don’t want to have to… do that. What you have to do. Like, I don’t even think I could.”</p><p>“Maybe the question is should we,” Sam says. “Should we even just fall into the mold. Just be the same as everyone else.”</p><p>“Same is safe,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“Exactly. Safe and controllable. I think… I think society thinks that the opposite of that is uncontrollable, chaos. But… what if it's not?”</p><p>“What else would it be?”</p><p>“I dunno,” Sam says. “Free?”</p><p>“Or dangerous.”</p><p>“Why d’you say that?”</p><p>Brigitte looks down and shakes her head. “I dunno. Because Ginger was out of control. Getting there… and I was scared. Like, scared for <em>her</em>. ‘Cause girls can’t live like that. She’d have just… she’d just go until she self-destructed.”</p><p>“Maybe that’s just a symptom of being controlled. Not what happens when you aren’t. You catch hold of anything long enough, it either chews its limbs off to escape, or it just gives up.”</p><p>“And you think people just give up?”</p><p>“Pretty much. Yeah.”</p><p>“So the only other option is self-destruction.”</p><p>“Or maybe someone’ll come along and open the trap. Or the trap’s so fucked and rusted it just crumbles apart. That would be the ideal. Complete collapse.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Brigitte says, and then. “Do you feel like you did? Give up?”</p><p>“No. Not yet,” Sam says. “But I dunno if there’s anything for me beyond the greenhouse. Just… that life. I don’t call it the family crypt for nothing.” And Brigitte doesn’t ask, so he doesn’t elaborate, which is probably just as well. </p><p>“You know, Ginge and I have this Pact. Had, maybe. <em>Out by sixteen…</em>” she takes a breath and he gets the sense that she’s hesitating, changing her mind. “It… basically means that we were gonna get out of Bailey Downs, or we were gonna kill ourselves.”</p><p>Sam hisses. It’s involuntary, like seeing someone injure themself, and he looks over. “Jesus christ.”</p><p>“I decided not to. Not to die, I mean. I just… I want there to be something other than this. Just suburbs and social… protocol.”</p><p>And, god, he wishes he could tell her there was, but the truth is that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if there’s anything beyond that, but he fucking wants it, too. He thinks, probably, most people do, but everyone’s wearing binders. All neatly labelled and preoccupied and tucked away into their little boxes. Windowed boxes called apartments or houses, moving boxes of transport like the one they’re in right now, boxes with job titles where people put threads of their literal lives into the machine until money comes out, and they eventually just unravel. </p><p>Like his dad did, like he’s afraid he’s going to.</p><p>“Then, what now? You leave?”</p><p>“I guess.”</p><p>Silence falls, just the sound of the tires on the back roads — old highway, and it feels like there’s no one out here, but them and the trees, and those big open Ontario fields.</p><p>“When’s sixteen?” he asks her, softly.</p><p>“September 19th.”</p><p>And Sam thinks that he’s just found her, and he’s losing her already.</p><p>“Guess that’s better than being dead.”</p><p>“I guess,” she says.</p><p>“Well, fuck,” he says. “If you find a way to escape Polite Conversation, I’d love to know what it is.”</p><p>“You’re doing it right now. Just… see, we’d be fine if it was always just this. Like, us. And me and Ginger… But that’s not… it can’t just be that way.”</p><p>And Sam’s caught on the way she said that — <em>we’d be fine if it was always just this</em> — and <em>oh, christ</em>, he thinks, <em>yes</em>. It makes more sense than anything he’s been able to come up with for a really long time. It kind of feels like hope.</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>It’s only four-thirty by the time they get back to the greenhouse, but the sun’s already setting. The plan is to set up a schedule for when she’ll show up for hours, designed to avoid Trina at all costs, even though they’re pretending that’s not exactly what’s happening, and she wonders if this is how Polite Conversation starts. </p><p>Afterwards, he says he’ll take her back home, and as she’s making her way towards the front, he says her name, “Here, wait,” he tells her, and waves her back in. She follows him down a row to a collection of potted hellebore like the winter roses they delivered today, only these ones are different — they’re not the soft pinks and whites, they’re richer — some so purple they almost look black, and others the kind of muted blue she’s only ever seen in watercolours or stained glass. He reaches in and extracts one. They’re all in smallish nursery pots, black and malleable, and he hands it to her. It’s dark purple, shot through with greenish grey. Muted, like it belongs to autumn, and not to the bright whites and reds of winter, and Christmas. “That’s yours,” he says. “Your associated plant.”</p><p>The hoya she thinks. She thinks how he said she was so not someone he’d associate with hoya. She looks up and wrinkles her nose at him. “<em>Roses</em>?” she asks.</p><p>“They’re not really roses,” he says, “they’re actually related to buttercups, and uh… larkspurs. They’re Ranunculaceae… like—”</p><p>“Like monkshood,” Brigitte says, softly. “Is it toxic?”</p><p>“Not like wolfsbane is,” Sam says. </p><p>“Why these?” she asks. </p><p>“They’re related to invisibility and protection. Exorcisms, sometimes. But also intelligence.”</p><p>“I read that people exorcise girls because they’re outspoken,” Brigitte says. “Or mentally ill, or angry. It’s usually not really demons.”</p><p>“Right. They’re confusing spirited with spirits… conveniently. Anyway. You should keep them, if you want.”</p><p>She looks up at him. “Why?” she asks.</p><p>“Because you save me from Polite Conversation.”</p><p>She holds the pot carefully in her lap on the drive home and when she gets out, instead of goodbye she asks “What’s the latin name?”</p><p>“<em>Helleborus purpurascens</em>,” Sam says, without missing a beat. She steps back, holding the flowers close to her chest to protect them from the wind, and gently shuts the door.</p><p>She goes down the basement steps, hears the water in the pipes that run over her head and down the far wall that means the shower is running. The door to their bathroom is closed, and Brigitte is almost relieved. Sometimes it’s easier to just be in the room before Ginger comes in, instead of walking in on her own. Sometimes, lately, that’s been making her feel like she has to reclaim the space, guess the secret password that seems to change day to day with her sister that gets Brigitte on her good side. She never knows what mood Ginger’s going to be in, and she hates that everything else ends up dictated by it. She doesn’t know what to do with the flower. There’s not really enough light down here, she realizes, hovering in the doorway with the pot in her hands. Eventually she turns and goes back upstairs. In the hutch in the craft room, Pamela has ceramic pots and vases and boxes of buttons that just seem to appear from nowhere. There’s a jar of pennies that’s so heavy Brigitte needs two hands to lift it. She finds a pot small enough and sets the delicate nursery pot inside and leaves the flower on the craft table where it will just blend in with Pamela’s other stuff, and maybe Ginger won’t ask about it. She hopes she doesn’t kill it accidentally. She should have asked Sam what to do, but then she can probably find it somewhere herself.</p><p>~</p><p>On Monday, she goes to the school library early enough in the morning that there’s not many people in there on the computers, yet. They have books on plants native to Ontario but nothing on what to actually do with flowers, and it seems ridiculous that she should be so worried about fucking it up, but she is. She finds a webpage that gives her basic care instructions though, and as she copies them down in her notebook so that she doesn’t have to ask the librarian for permission to use the printer, she thinks about what Sam said — that hellebore are related to invisibility, protection, exorcisms, and intelligence, and she wonders what that means, like— why is this the plant that makes him think of her? </p><p>She ends up researching contemporary exorcisms until the bell rings and it is just… overwhelmingly women and girls who are recorded as being demonically possessed, when they really just had epilepsy or a mental illness, or spoke their minds, or had a temper. She supposes that maybe, a long time ago, those things could have appeared interchangeable. Like lycanthropy and premenstrual syndrome. With disastrous consequences. These girls — the ones everyone thought were possessed — they could have lived normal lives with the proper treatment, but most of them died from neglect or starvation, tied down to their beds, with their entire families afraid of them. She could never have done anything like that to Ginger. Never.</p><p>Society, Brigitte thinks, is fucked.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>When school started this year, they’d talked about how Monday was the best day of the school week, because it was the day they had the most classes together, and Ginger’s free period was the last period of the day, and more often than not she could get Brigitte to skip with her, because it was just English. God, the first day of school feels like it was a year ago, when really it’s only been three months, and she feels like she’s caught in this shitty fucking limbo of wanting to be at home when she’s at school, and at school when she’s at home because Brigitte these days…</p><p>Something changed between them. Something that’s not her fault, Ginger thinks, but then there’s that horrible little voice in her head that tells her that it is her fault. That she’s always been cruel and overbearing and… even jealous, a little, when it comes to Bee, and it was just… just her inner monster made manifest after she was bitten in the playground that day that made Brigitte see what it was she was really dealing with. Like she’s a monster instead of a sister, a poltergeist that throws things, and rages, and bites, and scratches and that causes so much trouble that everyone just wants to get rid of her in any way at all.</p><p>Being around Brigitte lately is so fucking hard. Like Ginger looks at her, and sees all these familiar things — Brigitte’s narrow shoulders held tight, the way she turns her face away and wraps her arms around her body like protection — only now it’s directed at her. Sometimes Ginger dreams about the way Brigitte held her arm up between them that day at school, the day she cured her, like Brigitte couldn’t stand to be that close. It hurts so bad it feels like something’s tearing her insides into ribbons, and she misses Bee more than words can express, but she doesn’t know how to say it.</p><p>That’s why she’s so surprised when Brigitte reaches across the aisle as the bell goes in math class, and says “Wait for me?” barely audible as people start pushing their chairs back and gathering their stuff.</p><p>“I’m outta cigarettes,” Ginger says and so they cut across the field towards the corner store where the man at the cash sells cigarettes to girls without carding them, no matter how young they look, and so everyone at school goes there. Some girls that don’t even smoke go in to buy them for their boyfriends, their guy friends. She knows Brigitte hates the corner store because there’s always kids around, and today’s no different. She’s standing so close that Ginger can feel her at her back while she pays for her smokes. The guy leers at her and Ginger cocks her head and gives him her best sarcastic smile and eye flutter which falls as soon as she turns away, and she and Brigitte leave the store together.</p><p>“That guy gives me the creeps,” Brigitte says as they cross the parking lot in the vague direction of home.</p><p>“Lucky I’m here to buy our smokes then,” Ginger says through the cigarette between her teeth. They stop for Brigitte to find her lighter, and Ginger takes a drag and then hands it over. Brigitte just holds it for a moment and her eyes find Ginger’s.</p><p>“Ginge…” she starts, and every apology or promise that Ginger so desperately wanted to hear suddenly seems distasteful, like when she accidentally touches cigarette ash to her lips.</p><p>“Don’t,” Ginger says.</p><p>And Brigitte looks so hurt. It’s there for a second before she blinks it away and that’s not what Ginger meant, either. </p><p>“No, Bee,” Ginger says, and reaches just as Brigitte starts to turn away and, fuck, they don’t do this here at school, with people around, but she doesn’t fucking care. She gets her arms around Brigitte’s shoulders and buries her face in her hair and Brigitte gasps, then gasps again, softer, her breath hot against Ginger’s collarbone, and then her arms come up around her, too, and Ginger feels like she’s found all the pieces of herself for the first time in weeks and weeks.</p><p>Someone, somewhere, is laughing at them, and Brigitte goes tense until Ginger spreads her fingers over the back of her skull, buried in her tangled hair, and keeps her close. She doesn’t look up, but she can’t help thinking that that safe little world they used to be able to make — it’s so much harder to construct now, but she misses it viscerally. Misses it like home.</p><p>~</p><p>“Why do we keep fighting about stuff?” Brigitte asks, later, both of them hanging over the train tracks as the light fades fast around them.</p><p>Ginger takes a long time to actually spit the string of saliva she’s been creating out at the tracks and it falls somewhere just short of the metal rail. “Damn,” she whispers and then, “I dunno…”</p><p>“Tell me,” Brigitte says.</p><p>“You look at me different,” Ginger tells her. “Like in your eyes. You look at me different, and I can see it.”</p><p>“I don’t,” Brigitte says, with this helplessness and Ginger gets it. Like <em>what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?</em> She can’t change it any more than she can change the way her limbs are put together.</p><p>Ginger swallows. “I think…” I think I was always the monster… just, now you can see it. But, god, she can’t say it. “Sometimes I think you’ll hate me… but I want— I dunno, I want things I didn’t before, I want someone to fucking—” she feels her breath shake and catch somewhere in her diaphragm and she stops talking before she starts crying. She starts working up more spit instead, steps higher onto the railing to spit it with all her might downwards, and feels Brigitte’s hand at the small of her back, hanging onto her coat with a grip that feels white-knuckled against Ginger’s spine. Wherever it lands, she can’t see it anymore. It’s too dark down there, and she feels this twist in her gut that’s all fear.</p><p>Brigitte tugs and Ginger steps down from the rail, back onto the solid wood of the bridge and like mirror images, they turn to face one another. “I don’t know how to not be around you,” Ginger says, and goddamn it, the tears come anyway, so fast she can’t stop them. They’re hot against her cheeks because it’s so cold out here. “And I think sometimes I have to not.”</p><p>Brigitte’s blinking at her, blinking back tears, but she’s standing her ground. Ginger sees her clench her jaw, and this feels like the world’s worst breakup and she doesn’t even know why it’s happening, just that maybe she needs it to. And there’s this part of her that wants so desperately for Bee to have the answer, to come up with a solution that Ginger never could have thought of on her own, like Bee always does, but instead she says “I know,” and she doesn’t mean <em>I understand</em>, she means <em>I feel it too</em>. Ginger falls apart. She doesn’t mean to, but everything’s just been building and building and suddenly she’s sobbing on a pedestrian bridge in some shithole suburban town, and it feels more like her world’s ending than it ever has before.</p><p>She just sits down on the ground, lets her legs give out, and she buries her face in her arms. Somewhere above her, she can hear Brigitte’s breath break all wrong, but Brigitte doesn’t follow her down. She stands sentinel instead, like protection, and Ginger cries until she can’t, then leans her head back against the rusted iron railings, letting her legs spread out across the splintery wood and the snow and the slush, but her coat’s long enough to protect her from the worst of it. She was already cold anyway. She takes a breath that doesn’t shake too hard, and then looks up at Brigitte who wipes her face with both forearms at once.</p><p>“We should go home,” Brigitte says. “It’s getting dark.”</p><p>So they do.</p><p>And Ginger thinks maybe they won’t talk about it again, and she doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse, because they both know, now, that something between them’s changed. Like the thing that links them is starting to rot away from the inside, and once it has they’ll be separate, and Ginger doesn’t know if it’s going to be an open wound or not, when it finally does.</p><p>Somewhere in the middle of the night, her eyes too sleep-blurred to read the numbers on the alarm clock, her mattress dips, and cool air rushes in as the covers are lifted. Ginger doesn’t turn, doesn’t give any indication that she’s awake even when Brigitte curls around her back, but Bee knows, somehow. Against the top of Ginger’s spine, she takes a breath like she’s going to say something, and Ginger waits, practically holding her breath, but in the end she doesn’t say it, she just tucks herself closer and Ginger finds Brigitte’s hand beneath the bedsheets and twines her fingers through Brigitte’s, the back of her hand against Ginger’s palm, and pulls her arm around her tight.</p><p>~</p><p>The next day at lunch, they eat on the bleachers and Brigitte tells Ginger about the exorcisms, and her theory on how it’s just society’s way to control women that frighten them.</p><p>“Henry’s scared of me,” Ginger says. “I thought it a while ago. He had no idea what to do, like I’m so unpredictable or something. I think he’s scared of Pamela, too.”</p><p>“Then why would he cheat on her?” Brigitte asks. “If she was gonna go… wrathful.”</p><p>“‘Cause maybe it’s just… like blahh, you know? Blasé. Why else would guys come up with all these labels for us? Put us in a box and we’re fucking safe. All you have to do is call a girl a slut and the whole school’s against her.”</p><p>And like she’s been summoned, Trina appears. The timing is too perfect and Brigitte catches Ginger’s eye in this sly way and they both crack up. It’s pretty obvious what’s happening. There’s no one else around because Trina’s alone — and that’s what it is, Ginger thinks, that’s different. She’s not flanked by her friends, but she still has the balls to say “Fuck off, bitch,” as she passes.</p><p>“She hasn’t been part of her little gang since she freaked,” Ginger says.</p><p>Brigitte’s watching her go, through a protective tangle of hair. “I heard them talking about her,” Brigitte says, “The other day in the library. They just turn on one another like rats.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Ginger says. “Why even bother? I’d rather be dead.”</p><p>Brigitte makes a face, twists her mouth and goes back to the food between them. It’s last night’s leftovers, still half-cold because the school microwave is fucking repulsive and probably has diseases. Very quietly she asks “Do you actually like Jason?”</p><p>“You mean like what?” Ginger asks, but she can feel her shoulders tensing.</p><p>“I mean like a guy,” Brigitte says, looking up.</p><p>“I’m not like… in love with him or anything, ew,” Ginger says. “No, but I… I dunno, like… it’s good, Bee. Like once you kind of get the hang of it.”</p><p>Brigitte’s quiet for so long that Ginger’s starting to freak. But then she says “Just don’t get pregnant, okay?”</p><p>“You think I’m stupid?” Ginger asks.</p><p>“No, I just…” she’s too defensive, and they’re careening rapidly towards another fight. </p><p>“I won’t,” Ginger says, “I swear. Anyways, there’s other stuff that’s less… I won’t.”</p><p>Brigitte meets her eyes and then nods and looks away, exhaling relief, and it’s weird. Like since that talk on the bridge some tension between them has lifted, even though now there’s this… this knowledge that they need more space, and somehow that brings them closer, but it feels wrong, too. Just a little bit. It feels like feeling like you <em>need</em> a cigarette but insisting that you’re not addicted. It’s like that. </p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Pamela lands a job that takes the worried look out of her eyes, and suddenly it’s Christmas holidays. It’s the first Christmas Brigitte can remember that doesn’t have the house fully decked out in lights and decorations and she realizes, all at once, that Henry strung the lights outside, and that there’s not enough time for Pamela to do everything else now that she’s working. Suddenly they’re latchkey kids, which means the whole house is theirs from three-thirty to quarter to six and they’re entirely unsure what to do with it.</p><p>“Maybe we should do something,” Brigitte says. It’s the twenty-first of December, and there’s boxes of Christmas stuff everywhere like Pamela <em>intended</em> to do it, but just never got around to it.</p><p>“Like what?” Ginger asks, nudging a box with her foot. </p><p>“I dunno. We could put the tree up.”</p><p>“Ugh, jesus.”</p><p>“We never got anything for Pam. And I feel like…”</p><p>“Like Henry’s not gonna?”</p><p>Which is how they end up in the basement, lugging the sagging Christmas tree box out from storage. It takes two of them to get it up the stairs and then somewhere between the trying to get it into the tree stand, and the shower of earwigs that fall from its branches and into Brigitte’s hair, they’re reached peak levels of shrieking and hilarity, which is when Ginger suggests they put Halloween decorations on it instead of the Christmas ones because they’re such a pain in the ass to untangle and hang up.</p><p>They’ve just finished crowning the tree with a witch hat when they hear the car in the drive. They lock eyes with uncertainty. They’re always downstairs by the time Pamela gets home, but it seems strange to disappear now and leave the mess of boxes and discarded decorations. Brigitte steps down from the chair she was using to reach the top of the tree as the front door opens and Pamela steps inside.</p><p>There’s a beat where none of them really moves, not really sure what to do with this strange new encounter. Ginger breaks the stillness to reach up and brush an earwig from Brigitte’s shoulder and Brigitte steps on it, because she’s the one wearing slippers.</p><p>Ginger snorts, and then dissolves into laughter. Brigitte almost smiles at her, but bites it back as she looks back at their mother.</p><p>Pamela’s expression of surprise has shifted into something else. She says “Well. This is lovely,” and Brigitte genuinely can’t tell if she’s being serious or not. And then “Henry would hate it.”</p><p>Ginger’s literally cackling behind her and finally Brigitte breaks, exhaling a huff of laughter. She hides it behind her hair, looks away quickly.</p><p>“No, really, I’m impressed,” Pamela says. “It’s perfect.” And it kind of is, Brigitte thinks, because it’s not a mask. It’s not pretending everything’s fine with a perfect tree and perfect decorations. It’s not acting like Ginger’s sometimes closer to her than ever, and sometimes a total stranger, it’s not acting like Henry’s going to come back and bring their house back to its normal rhythm, or even that they particularly want him to. It’s crooked, literally — the tree canting oddly to one side, covered in pumpkins and cobwebs and lightly decorated with the bones of a squirrel they found in the woods last Spring. Brigitte loves it, and it’s one of those things, she discovers later, after dinner and standing alone in the lamplit living room, that she can’t photograph to remember. In the end, she holds the camera up to see the tree through the viewfinder, but she doesn’t press the button. It’s bigger than that, somehow, and she doesn’t need a picture to hang onto it.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. truths</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>PAMELA</strong>
</p><p>It’s not unusual to come across one of her girls in the strangest places, doing the strangest things, so she’s not entirely surprised to come downstairs early one morning to find Brigitte at the craft table, watering a plant nearly an hour before they normally get up for school. She gets the smallest of glances from beneath a curtain of hair, the tiniest hitch in her movements. Pam wishes that Brigitte was better at being sociable — wishes she was better at holding her own in more situations. Sometimes she wonders if that’s her fault. Before they went to primary school, it was always just Pamela and her little girls — sometimes spending days without leaving the house at all, seeing no one but Henry. The girls didn’t have playdates when they were small, mostly because Pamela — with two babies less than a year apart and a home to take care of — had her hands full, and hadn’t had time for any of those places she imagines mothers must go to meet other mothers. Maybe she didn’t socialize them well enough.</p><p>Maybe Pam’s been lonely longer than she thought. Maybe the girls were a way to escape Henry: all those afternoons of fingerpaints and tea parties in the playhouse. The days when Brigitte would leave the ribbons in her hair (but Ginger never would) if they were going to Grammy’s. Maybe she liked having them all to herself, for a little while. But they grew up and grew away from her almost shockingly quickly. Ginger first, then Brigitte, and then Pamela was shut out completely, of the world they created.</p><p>Sometimes she thinks Henry welcomed it — the way the girls pulled away. He was the one that agreed to the basement bedroom, the one that put in the full bath downstairs. Sometimes she thinks Henry helped the girls lock themselves away from her because he didn’t want her to have them. And sometimes she thinks that maybe she’s just being spiteful. Henry could never be that clever.</p><p>“I wondered,” Pamela says, her eyes on the potted flowers, “where that came from.”</p><p>Brigitte falters, her hands uncertain on the glass she’s using to water it, brushing her fingers over the leaves soft as a breeze. “It’s from the greenhouse. Community involvement.” Green eyes flicker up to hers, and the expression on her face is somewhere between innocence and a challenge.</p><p>“They’re pretty,” Pam says. “Very autumnal.”</p><p>Brigitte looks back down at them, their dark petals — almost brown in the early morning grey. “It’s hellebore,” she says, so softly it’s barely more than a whisper.</p><p>“What are you going to do with it?” Pamela asks, because the girls have never been interested in her garden, or caring for plants. Sometimes Ginger brings home wildflowers and weeds, but they let them die in their vases of water downstairs, and Pamela finds them in the trash weeks later, stems sticking out and dripping onto her clean linoleum. </p><p>“Huh?” Brigitte asks. </p><p>“Is it a project?”</p><p>“No, he… just gave them to me.”</p><p>That catches her attention. “Oh,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else to say that won’t make Brigitte balk. “Well… we can put it in the garden, in the spring. It looks like it’s the type to spread.”</p><p>“If I can keep it alive that long,” Brigitte says, almost sardonically, and Pam watches her touch her fingers to the soil to check how damp it is before she gently pushes it back in place on the table and goes to put the glass in the sink. And Pam watches her and wonders, but says nothing more.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“Guess I never really thought about money stuff until we had to hang all our clothes up to dry,” Brigitte says. It’s been a cold day, but it’s one of hers, at the greenhouse, and so it’s been good all the same. He brought her in from the greenhouses to make tea and actually warm up a little before he sends her off into the snow. She insisted on walking home — probably had plans with Ginger which means she doesn’t want him or his van anywhere near her house in case it screws anything up. Sam has thoughts on that — like how staying in the good graces of a best friend, or a sister, shouldn’t be so difficult — but he keeps his mouth shut.</p><p>“Yeah, I’ve been there,” Sam says. He’s sitting across from her on the coffee table. “When I just started. I forgot electricity bills existed and ended up with the power being cut. Then I realized how expensive it was, and just forwent lights altogether, for months. Candles warm up a room surprisingly well in the winter.”</p><p>“When was that?”</p><p>“I dunno… maybe four years ago.”</p><p>“How old were you?” she asks, and he meets her gaze and thinks <em>I know what you’re doing.</em> “Nineteen,” he says, finally. The truth.</p><p>He watches her do the math in her head, and there’s this flicker of realization before she furrows her brow a little and ducks her head. “Why couldn’t you— couldn’t you ask for help?” she says, into her teacup.</p><p>“I uh…” Sam takes a breath. “I didn’t really have anyone to ask. My dad had just died, so… a lot of the money from the greenhouse went into the funeral and I… just had to figure it out, after that.”</p><p>“…Sorry,” she says, by route. Because she’s supposed to. “Was it, like… cancer, or?”</p><p>“No, he killed himself. Um… way out in the woods. Went fishing for a weekend and didn’t come back.”</p><p>“Who found him?”</p><p>Sam bites his lower lip and can’t really look at her. He wishes he’d had the foresight to put some rye in his tea, but the kitchen suddenly feels awfully far away. “…Me,” he says, softly. “We both knew that area like the back of our hand — this… shitty fishing cabin out in the sticks. I think I kind of knew… what I was going to find.”</p><p>She’s as still as she can be, sitting with her legs crossed under her on the couch. </p><p>“What about your mom?” she asks.</p><p>“<em>She</em> died of cancer,” Sam says. “When I was eight.”</p><p>She exhales. “Sorry,” she says, more rushed, but more genuine this time. This time she feels it, and Sam didn’t really want it to end up here.</p><p>“It’s okay. It’s all, you know… it’s past.”</p><p>She looks up, struggles with herself for a moment, like she isn’t sure she wants to say it, or how to say it, but finally she asks “Is it hard?” and he doesn’t know if she means someone dying or living afterwards, but he supposes it’s one and the same, and he kind of has to laugh. Exhales it through his nose as he smiles. It’s the cool guy smile, the drug dealer smile. It’s protection and it comes up like a wall. But then he looks back at her — her green eyes, pale sliver of her face through her hair — and feels it all come crumbling down. Whatever he was going to say slips through his fingers like sand, and all he’s left with is truth.</p><p>“Sometimes.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>As she walks home, a little while later she thinks about how she’s never really considered the implications of her suicide beyond just everyone’s immediate reaction, their reaction in the moment. She’s never thought of the lasting effects. After. She hasn’t wanted to die for a long time — maybe she never wanted it, not really, but she knows for certain, now, that what she was doing was a game, an art project. And for other people — maybe for Sam’s dad, and for Ginger — it’s not.</p><p>She has to stop herself from running home, and tells herself over and over, to the rhythm of her heart, her boots on the cold, hard pavement <em>she won’t, she won’t…</em></p><p>She won’t leave.</p><p>And she knows that their agreement, now: <em>Out by sixteen</em>, is out of Bailey Downs and not out of this life forever. She knows that, because that’s what they settled on that afternoon in the kitchen. Or that’s the ultimatum. Brigitte finds a way to get them out of here before next September, or Ginger…</p><p>But she won’t let that happen.</p><p>She won’t.</p><p>~</p><p>She’s at the greenhouse the day after Christmas, early enough in the morning that the rising sun is painting all of the east windows gold. For days they’ve been wrapping poinsettias’ nursery pots in shiny foil and carefully packing them up to be delivered. Brigitte thinks it’s funny that Sam will pre-heat the car for the flowers, but never for people. She thinks that’s the epitome of the kind of person he is. He’s so careful with everything, even though he thinks it’s tedious work. She, on the other hand, likes the repetition of it, the quiet monotony, because it gives her something to do with her hands while they talk. </p><p>She knows Trina’s been here. Knows that the work she's assigned, the work that still gets done on her days off, is done by Trina, and she wonders what they do when they’re here together. She wonders what they talk about, but Sam always seems like he’s been waiting when she shows. Like he’s got all this stuff to say, all these thoughts. She can’t always find the connections Sam makes between one topic and the next, but she likes that it’s scattered. Their conversations spiral around and around, back to something they thought of that morning, now hours later, then flick right back to what they were talking about a few minutes ago. It should feel disjointed, or even like they’re struggling for something to talk about, but it doesn’t and they’re not. Sometimes she doesn’t know if he can get her to talk the way he does because he can really make her think, or because he listens. </p><p>Brigitte is used to being interrupted. She takes pauses when she’s thinking instead of just talking nonsense, filling the space, and she talks soft. When she was younger, the combination of that would make people — especially adults — just barrel over her words the next time she opened her mouth. They always took her train of thought and brought it in the wrong direction. Ginger never did that, though, and Sam doesn’t either, and she thinks he’s different from others — other kids, other adults… she’s never really sure which category he belongs in. He’s sort of liminal. Just Sam, just like he’s always been, and she supposes it doesn’t really matter that much anyway.</p><p>This morning, their breath misting in front of them despite the fact that the sun on the windows makes her feel almost warm. Today, she helping him do inventory for an order he’s received, and all but a small table of shiny, foil-wrapped Christmas flowers are gone, and she’s kind of relieved. She likes the subtler greens of the place without bright, shiny Christmas colours. Somehow, all that foil and wrapping made the flowers seem synthetic, even though she could touch them — impossibly soft petals between her fingers — and know that they weren’t. Christmas kind of has a way of sucking real feeling out of things, she thinks, when it’s all commercialized. She misses the old books Grammy used to have — Christmas stories from publications in the 1800s, kind of spooky, mostly sad. She wonders what happened to those books.</p><p>“I never really thought about what things cost,” Brigitte tells him, falling into their habit of continuing days-old conversations as if there was never a break. And she thinks about all the ways Pamela is trying to ‘conserve money’ as she calls it — not using the dryer, only using the oven for suppers, turning lights off — the girls have no problem with that. Everything in their room is usually candles anyway. But cutting her showers to fifteen minutes is hard with hair like hers, that tangles the moment it’s wet and takes forever to wash shampoo out of. She thinks about the way she and Ginger used to share the bath, and the way that suddenly stopped around when Ginger turned fourteen, and she misses it. Candles and warm water and Ginger’s laughter. Some of their deepest talks were there, in that tub, the little mushroom statues casting huge flickering shadows on the wall in the candlelight, making Brigitte feel like they were in some sort of surreal forest — a place even closer, even more intimate than even their bedroom, almost womblike. She misses it viscerally, now, and takes to washing her hair separately, hanging over the edge of the tub with her head upside down under the roaring flood of the bath tap. It tangles worse than ever, but at least it gets all the soap out.</p><p>“Maybe you shouldn’t know that stuff as kids.”</p><p>Brigitte shoots him a glare. “I’m not—”</p><p>“Yeah, I’m— I just meant, like… money’s such a fucking… bullshit idea, and it is. Just an idea. There’s not enough bills and coins in the world to make up the amount of money and debt that supposedly exists — like, corporeally. We’ve made up something totally arbitrary: money, the economy — and then we told people that we needed it to live, but the truth is… we don’t. We just don’t know how to think outside the box, either.</p><p>“Money feels pretty real when it changes the way you live. Like, the way your house operates, the way the people in it exist… Pamela used to be home all the time, and now she never is, it’s like…” she takes a breath and gets overwhelmed by the thought, so she stops and shakes her head. <em>Never mind. </em></p><p>“Money rules us,” Sam says, “I get that. I <em>live</em> that, but it’s like… it’s fake. It’s pixels on a screen that they print into little columns in your bank book. Like those little numbers are supposed to mean something, but they don’t. It’s just a make-believe game we all fucking... collectively let get too real.”</p><p>“How do you escape it then?” Brigitte asks.</p><p>“...Sustainability?” Sam says — says it like a question, but it’s not one. It’s a suggestion. “Self-sufficiency, frugality. We get so used to just throwing away what we don’t need. We never look at broken, or worn out things and think about how we might fix them. We just buy and buy a bunch of shit that we don't fucking need, looking for some kind of fucking fulfillment...”</p><p>Brigitte's quiet for a moment, taking that in. When she collects her thoughts, she asks: “When you say self-sufficiency, what do you mean? Like being your own boss? Don’t you already do that?”</p><p>“No I mean like… removing yourself from society. Growing your own food, making your own… candles, composting. I mean existing off the grid, doing real work for real gain. Like, if I… dry seeds from a plant, and then put them in the ground; and I take care of it and weed and water it, and grow it into something that provides food for me, that’s real. Selling people flowers isn’t. I mean… I’d like to be able to feed myself without ever stepping foot inside a grocery store. That kind of work — meaningful work, it’s different from the daily grind. Capitalism breaks jobs down into tiny parts, its ultimate goal being that you don’t ever gain any real skills, and you could never complete the whole job yourself. So you stay stuck forever. It’s why businesses just break down if one person calls in sick. It’s a bullshit way to exist.”</p><p>“But you do it.”</p><p>“I’m working on not.”</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte cocks her head at him. “You wanna be a farmer,” she says.</p><p>He smiles at her. “Not exactly. Kind of. But like permaculture, regenerative farming. I dunno... I wanna live, like... just simply.”</p><p>She takes a deep breath. “Sometimes I think… like, I’m not cut out for this place. When I think about jobs and… and surviving, next— after high school… I just… I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do.”</p><p>“University? College, you’re smart enough. You could take that camera of yours off to art school.”</p><p>She snorts. “I can’t believe someone like you believes in higher education.”</p><p>He shrugs. “If you wanna do it. If it means something to you. Not because they tell you to, or it's because it's supposedly gonna get you a job.”</p><p>“But then what? I don’t like people enough to talk to them everyday. I don’t… I’m… I’m worried that there’s not gonna be a place for me. Like a place where I can… exist like I do…” <em>With Ginger. With you…</em> “It’s stupid.”</p><p>“It’s not,” Sam says. “But you’ll be okay.”</p><p>She rolls her eyes. “You can’t know that.”</p><p>“I mean… you’re working now,” he tells her.</p><p>“I’m volunteering, now.”</p><p>“Do you like it?”</p><p>“…Yes,” she says, all suspicion. He smiles at her, thinks she’s half feral. And maybe she’s right. Maybe a real job — a pretty casket that society calls a career — maybe it would kill her, slow and surreptitious the way this kind of life does — the daily grind, the nine to five. Sometimes he feels like it’s killing him. He hates the people, and the money, and the budgeting. But he loves the plants. Sometimes that feels like enough, and sometimes it feels like an excuse. Maybe he shouldn’t be pouring his cynicism out for this girl, and letting it pool like oil at their feet. Maybe he’s just making it worse.</p><p>“What if it wasn’t?” he asks her. “Volunteering.”</p><p>“I would fail high school,” Brigitte says, but she’s looking at him with uncertainty, trying to suss him out.</p><p>“Could be under the table. And if you like it here,” he shrugs. “You could stay on. Just an idea.”</p><p>“Why are you trying to convince me to join your capitalist enterprise?” she asks, and there’s this lilt in her voice, the driest humour. “If you hate it so much?”</p><p>“I’m not. I mean, hey, we’d be ducking the system. And once I figure out the whole self-sufficiency thing, I’ll let you come.”</p><p>“Oh, wow, how good of you,” she says, sardonic, and he laughs a little and looks away. They both go back to their respective tasks.</p><p>“I’d want you to come,” Sam says, hears himself say it, and feels the way it tightens his throat, because he didn’t realize how badly he wanted it until he spoke it out loud. </p><p>Then Brigitte quietly says “Okay. I’m in.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She halves the money she gets from “volunteering” at the greenhouse and gives half to Pamela, to help with bills. It’s not much, and at first Pamela refuses, but Brigitte insists. It’s the first time she can remember actually holding her ground with Pamela, not just lying or leaving or acquiescing. It feels good. It feels like the right things to do. The other half she hides away. That way Pam has no idea how much time she’s actually with Sam — because at the rate she’s going, she’ll clock forty hours in no time — but it’s also something… a starter fund, for next September. She doesn’t tell Ginger, not yet. She wants to bring it out at the right time. Like hope. A hidden collection of paper rectangles that mean nothing at all unless you play pretend that writing ten or twenty or fifty on a piece of paper and cotton means it’s ten or twenty or fifty of anything at all. For now, pretending feels better. It feels like an answer, and she doesn’t care that it’s fake if it means her and Ginger can blow, someday, for someplace else. Everyone else, after all, is still playing the game.</p><p>~</p><p>One afternoon, on a Sunday, Sam drives her home at just the wrong time. Brigitte is just pushing open his passenger door to get out when Pamela pulls into the driveway. She doesn’t pull into the garage as usual though, and Brigitte feels dread drop like a stone into the pit of her stomach.</p><p>“Fuck,” she mutters to herself and Sam, maybe reading her, reaches out to turn the music off as Brigitte gets out of the van.</p><p>“Brigitte?” That’s Pamela, stepping out into the driveway, and Brigitte shoots Sam a look that’s meant to be a <em>You should probably go, now</em>, and he catches her eyes, but he either doesn’t understand (Ginger would’ve), or doesn’t listen, because he doesn’t leave. </p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“He— drove me home,” Brigitte says. She backs away from the van and into her driveway like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t, and he doesn’t know if it’s him or if it could be anyone, she’s so unused to having any friends in her life other than Ginger.</p><p>Somehow, from the way they talk about her, he expected their mother to look different. Blonde maybe, taller: the storybook wife who makes sure everything’s in its place. Or maybe he thought she’d look more like the girls. As it stands though, she’s just dark-haired and bundled into a bright raspberry coloured coat, and she’s putting two and two together pretty fast. Sam puts out his cigarette and sort of braces himself for interacting with other humans as Pamela approaches, paper bag of shopping in one arm. She slips a little, in the drive, despite the fact that she’s wearing practical boots, and loses something from the bag.</p><p>“Jesus,” she says, but she says it like she shouldn’t be swearing, like there’s “kids” around. It sounds more like ‘jeezuz’ anyway. Like she’s the kind of person who says things like ‘oh, fudge.’ And Sam has no idea what it’s like to be a teenager in public with his mother, because he never was, but Brigitte — who’d stepped back out of his periphery — appears again to pick up a carton of blueberries from the drive, shaking the snow off of it.</p><p>“You must be from the greenhouse,” Pamela says.</p><p>“Yeah, that’s me.”</p><p>“Mom,” Brigitte says. Sam thinks he can hear her dying inside. </p><p>“I’m Pamela,” she says, and her right hand is full of groceries, so she doesn’t reach out, but Sam feels like she would have. She’s being friendly enough.</p><p>“Um, Sam,” he says, failing pretty spectacularly at friendliness, and then — because there’s an in, here, and it’s been driving him crazy — “I could shovel your driveway for you.” Brigitte does something in his peripheral, dark against the snow, that is both minuscule at the same time as it is about three movements short of just collapsing and he almost laughs.</p><p>“Oh,” Pamela says, “Well, I’ve been meaning to.”</p><p>“I’ve got a shovel in the back,” he says, and hopes that doesn’t make him sound like a murderer. He does, though. Along with a rake, a chainsaw, and a whole shit ton of burlap he hasn’t unpacked yet. “I don’t mind.”</p><p>“Mom,” Brigitte says again, “The food.”</p><p>“We’ll bring the food in, Pamela says, “Then I can move my van.”</p><p>“Great,” Sam says, and gets out.</p><p>“You should have escaped,” Brigitte tells him under her breath as he comes around to help with the groceries, too.</p><p>“One of you is gonna break your neck out here.”</p><p>“Yeah, like you, after I push you.”</p><p>Sam laughs, and at the front door Pamela pauses, looking back at the two of them in time to see Brigitte hide a smile by reaching for another bag of groceries.</p><p>~</p><p>He sort of didn’t intend to go in, but there’s a lot of bags, and otherwise he’d just be sitting in his van, waiting for her to move her car, so he follows them in through the front door and into the kitchen, feeling out-of-place as hell. </p><p>He sees the Christmas tree first, if you could call it that. It’s mostly decorated in black and orange, with purple here and there. There’s those soft, fake cobwebs stretched all over it, and it looks a little worse for wear. It's also crooked. “Wow,” Sam says, stopping abruptly. Brigitte almost crashes into him. “How lovely,” he says, voice dry as dust. </p><p>“Go,” Brigitte tells him, and nods towards the kitchen.</p><p>And there’s the hellebore on the table, still very much alive and seeing it here, in this place, and not just in Brigitte’s hands in the van or the greenhouse, it’s… strange. Like he thought maybe… maybe things like that didn’t exist outside of those spaces they were often together.</p><p>“Hey,” he says.</p><p>“I... didn’t kill it yet,” she says, and then tugs his sleeve so that he follows her back out the door, and his heart’s beating harder than it should, from just carrying groceries inside. Her fingers were cold.</p><p>“You don’t have to,” Brigitte says, trailing him to the back of his truck as Pamela pulls out of the driveway and onto the street.</p><p>Sam shrugs, and opens up the back for the shovel. “I’ll feel better knowing it’s done.”</p><p>~</p><p>Brigitte’s been in and out with him while he works, but the last time she went in was a while ago and it’s getting dark now. It feels awkward to knock just to tell her he’s going, so he doesn’t, he just closes the truck up and moves around to the front when an orange glow falls across the snow to his feet. He looks up and Pamela’s in the doorway so he crosses to the bottom of the steps. She has her wallet in her hands and Sam shakes his head, pushing his hands into his pockets. “That’s okay,” he says, before she can even offer.</p><p>“Well,” she tells him. “We appreciate it.” And she looks like she wants to say something else, so he waits, trying not to fidget, trying not to shift his weight, trying not to think about what it might be. In the end, though, she just says “Drive safe.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Later, she’s in the rec room with the TV glowing softly when she hears the slide of the window from their room. She shuts the show off and follows the sound. </p><p>Ginger hops down from the windowsill looking flushed and tangled. She sees Brigitte and says “<em>Bee</em>,” like she’s the best thing in the world and Brigitte actually feels her stomach flip. Ginger throws her arms around her and any elevation in Brigitte’s mood — pulled to the surface so often by Ginger’s — sinks back to the depths again, because she smells like alcohol, sharp and sweet. </p><p>“Did Jason <em>drive</em> you here?”</p><p>“No, I walked. My boots are fucked, come into the bathroom with me,” Ginger says and half pulls, half pushes away from Brigitte so that they both stumble, and then Brigitte’s trailing her sister into their shared bathroom so that she can unzip her boots and dump a significant amount of snow into the tub. </p><p>“Pamela knows you were out,” Brigitte says, huddled into the corner of the room, watching as Ginger, who is sitting on the edge of the tub, peels off her wet socks. She looks cold, her toes red, her cheeks and nose, too. Brigitte can actually feel the chill coming off of her, and she smells like outside, in the tiny little room. Like outside and something that isn’t rye, but smells just as strong. </p><p>“So what?”</p><p>Brigitte has nothing to say. They’re still on winter break and it’s not like they have anywhere to be, tomorrow. Tomorrow Trina’s at the greenhouse, and school is out for another week. So she just shrugs and thinks that if she doesn’t just deal with this, they’re going to have another fight, so she says “You look cold.”</p><p>“Fucking freezing,” Ginger says, and reaches behind her to turn on the bath. She stands, only a little unsteady, and pulls her sweater over her head, tangling her hair even more. It falls in narrow red tendrils over her face and Brigitte fucking aches with how beautiful she is, even windblown and cold and drunk, and then wonders if that’s normal at all, and then wonders if it matters anyway. She’s never wanted to be normal.  She turns to leave her alone to bathe saying “Don’t drown, okay?” and Ginger says “Bee, wait.”</p><p>Brigitte turns back to Ginger who has her shirt in her hands, haphazardly held against her chest, the curve of her breast disappearing into dark blue fabric, held up only by Ginger’s arm across her chest, her narrow fingers. Brigitte thinks they look so delicate now, her hands, now that those claws are gone. Ginger’s hair spills over her shoulders like a painting. She’s shockingly pale and shockingly flushed and for a moment the rushing water mingles with the static sound in Brigitte’s head.</p><p>“Come with me. Like we used to,” Ginger says. “We can talk,” and Brigitte thought that she wanted it. Missed it so much until this very moment, but suddenly the thought of undressing next to Ginger makes her feel profoundly inadequate. The only curves her own body offers up are the sharp line of her narrow hips — the angles of knees and elbows and the way she never quite feels like she fits herself. Ginger is all softness and strength, and Brigitte is a collection of tight tendons and muscle that have never learned how to fully relax. She feels, suddenly, profoundly ridiculous, like a doll someone’s thrown together with spare parts, next to a person who’s real and she realizes that they’ve crossed some threshold somewhere that turned Ginger into someone who has claimed her own body — knows how hold it and touch it, and how she wants it to be touched and seen and Brigitte — Brigitte is lost.</p><p>Left behind.</p><p>“I just showered,” she says, “this morning, so,” and it shouldn’t matter. It <em>doesn’t</em>, but she can’t. She just can’t. When she leaves she shuts the door so carefully behind her that it doesn’t even make a sound.</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>She feels, sometimes, like she’s being punished for something she didn’t do. For something she can’t control. She feels like she’s wrong for wanting, wrong for wanting others to want her. Wrong for every cigarette she shares with someone who isn’t Brigitte, and for every time her lips touched the mouth of the glass bottle, tonight, that Jason’s lips also touched. Wrong for the way her body can slide and clench around his fingers inside her until it’s supernovas. Wrong for missing Brigitte in environments she can’t even imagine Brigitte in. Wrong for wanting, now, to recreate a childhood moment — their shared baths — that she’s leaving behind. </p><p>But the current is carrying her this way, towards different shores, and she can’t swim against it, back to the place she left — the place she left Bee — because she’ll fucking drown if she does. The current’s too strong.</p><p>Ginger lets herself slip beneath the bath water which is so hot against her cold skin that it almost hurts. She slips beneath the surface and keeps her eyes shut and all she can hear is the thud thud thud of her heart beneath the water.</p><p>
  <em>Don’t drown, okay?</em>
</p><p>And Ginger has to come up for air, but it’s only so that she can cry, soundless but violently, into the circle of her palms, and wonders why the fuck she can’t be whole on either shore. Because it used to be that Bee was her everything, and now she needs more. She wishes she didn’t, but she does. She wants more so much she can’t do anything to stop it. But Bee doesn’t want anything to do with the places Ginger goes. </p><p>She doesn’t need what Ginger does, to feel, even momentarily, like she’s living.</p><p>~</p><p>She doesn’t let herself think much about why she does it, why she lets Jason into their room, their space, the safest of places. But it’s right before school starts again, and Brigitte’s nowhere to be found and it was only for a minute, honestly, or she meant for it to be.</p><p>There’s something that makes her feel powerful, being the master of this space that Jason’s unfamiliar in. She knows that the lock on the far door sticks, that you have to push the door into the frame to get the deadbolt in or out. She knows how many layers of purple coat the walls and which drawer holds the long kitchen knife and what the numbered sticky notes on the wall mean — the countdown calendar, frozen at 352 days until their suicides. They haven’t taken off a number in a while, now, Ginger thinks, and so it’s less now. Less until “out”, which means, these days, out of Bailey Downs. As long as Brigitte’s still planning. </p><p>Jason’s overwhelmed. By the candles, the colours. He’s only seen their room in pictures, in the death slideshow, where she and Bee had transformed it into a macabre horror movie scene — blood and nooses and dead girls. She wonders if it seems like it’s lacking something now, or covering up something up — like a chalk outline hidden beneath a carpet. </p><p>He’s trapped, really, between the two beds, and Ginger paces the perimeter quietly, half-lit, like a predator and he doesn’t even notice. Boys are so innocent, she thinks, so naïve. Boys don’t walk home with their house keys between their knuckles. Boys don’t learn to walk fast to look like they’re going somewhere even when they’re not, or to pay attention to their surroundings in the basements of buildings and car parks and unlit paths home. She feels sorry for him, but more than that she feels jealous. Jealous of how carefree boys are allowed to be. All the things that are open to them, all the midnight, wide open places that will never be open to her.</p><p>But Jason’s different. At least in that he knows that there’s more out there, in the dark, than most people know. And that’s almost enough. He understands her better than anyone else, still. Understands transformation and thresholds and what true hunger feels like. She can’t even talk about that stuff to Bee, because she gets so uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to think of Ginger as the monster. She doesn’t want to admit that the monster’s still in her, just different now, without the virus — now, it’s all her.</p><p>“Which bed is yours?” Jason asks and Ginger cocks her head at him from the shadows.</p><p>“Guess,” she says, because they look the same, but she wants to see if he knows. Wants to see if he can just tell.</p><p>He looks at them and then kind of laughs and says “I dunno,” just as there’s a click and a scrape and the far door opens, flooding the room momentarily with outside light.</p><p>It falls over Ginger, chases the shadows off her, leaves her feeling seen and strange and unprotected. Brigitte stops so abruptly it’s almost comedic, but Ginger’s not laughing. Bee's eyes are on Jason, and her mouth falls open. Something passes over Brigitte’s face like a dark cloud, and then her eyes flicker to Ginger’s and she thinks, for a second, her heart stops. Brigitte whirls around and walks out, leaves the door open.</p><p>“W— Bee!” Ginger follows her out. She has to catch Brigitte, who’s already two steps up, and pulls her back around. Brigitte slips, and her hands come up as if to push Ginger away, but she doesn’t. “What the <em>fuck</em> is he doing here?” she whispers, and it comes out so fiercely that Ginger steps back anyway.</p><p>“I just—”</p><p>“You let him into our <em>room</em>, Ginger? Jason. <em>Jason</em> McCardy.”</p><p>“It was just for a second, I—”</p><p>“You can’t!” Brigitte says, over her, and there’s tears in her eyes that cut Ginger to the quick. </p><p>“Well you <em>could</em> let me fucking explain!”</p><p>“<em>No</em>,” Brigitte says. “I don’t care what you do, but you can’t bring him in here.” Suddenly Brigitte steps around her and goes back to the bedroom doorway. “Get out,” she says to Jason, and her voice is almost collected, as low and controlled as ever, but Ginger hears it shake. Jason doesn’t move. “Get out now,” Brigitte says and Jason puts his hands up and says “Okay, all right, jesus,” and moves. She glares at him as he moves past her. Brigitte pushes their bedroom door closed and rounds on them both, but her eyes are on Ginger. As controlled as she sounds, she doesn’t look it. Ginger can see everything wrong — the way her fingers flex and twist, the way she angles her chin down so that her face is half-hidden. </p><p>“Bee—” she doesn’t know what posses her to say it. Maybe she’s embarrassed. Maybe it’s guilt. “Don’t be such a fucking baby.”</p><p>Brigitte catches her breath, and then she is crying and Ginger wishes she could rewind, try again. She takes half a step forward but Brigitte’s gone, slipping around her to go upstairs. Somewhere in the house, a door slams and it rattles through Ginger’s bones, apocalyptic. Brigitte doesn’t shout and slam doors. Brigitte doesn’t cry. Ginger’s altered something, this time. And she knows it. She feels it settle inside her, dark and heavy, irrevocable. </p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She isn’t crying by the time she reaches the greenhouse, but she’s still furious — sick with it. Their room — it was meant to be sacred. Not even Pamela or Henry ever came in. And Ginger brought <em>Jason</em>. Jason who bullies and shouts lewd comments and fucking scares her — genuinely scares her — Ginger let <em>him</em> into their room. The guy who cornered her in the janitor's closet at school, hurt her, threatened her. Brigitte wants to tear something up, she wants to scream, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even let herself cry, properly, just forces it down until her throat hurts from gasping in the cold air. She forgot her coat, but she walks fast.</p><p>She pushes open the outer door, then the door to the office and feels like she’s slammed into a wall. Sam is nowhere to be seen, but Trina’s sitting at the desk, and she looks up with a start and fuck— <em>fuck</em>, Brigitte forgot that she would be here today. Somehow, she forgot. </p><p><em>You’re so stupid</em>, she thinks to herself. <em>Don’t be such a fucking baby</em>, but all of her safe spaces are gone, all at once. Their room, the greenhouse. She can’t breathe, genuinely. A wave of heat and dread hits her all at once, and with such force that her legs almost give out beneath her. She feels sick. She needs to sit down, but she also needs to leave because Trina’s looking at her like she’s sprouted a third head or something, and that registers vaguely beneath all the rest. Brigitte steps back and realizes she can’t really feel her limbs. Her hands and feet are tingling like there’s no circulation and, holy shit, she’s dying—</p><p>Trina touches the desk, braces her hand against it like she might get up and Brigitte turns to go, but there’s all these white spots in her vision and she stumbles and drops to her knees, her hands hitting the cold earth, but she can’t feel it.</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>“Sam?!” she calls out, because something definitely fucking wrong. Fitzgerald’s always a freak, but she also looks like she’s just seen a ghost. She’s so pale that she looks ghostlike herself, and she’s got this look in her eyes like she’s barely aware of where she is. Trina half-stands to go get Sam herself because, who knows, maybe fucking Fitz will try to murder her or something, but then Brigitte goes down hard. Just drops, and Trina goes to her instead.</p><p>She doesn’t touch her at first, but then she kind of has to because this is scaring the shit out of her, like maybe it’s anaphylaxis or something, and Trina hates her guts but she doesn’t want her to drop dead in front of her either. She was kind of having an okay day up until now, and that would <em>definitely</em> ruin it. She crouches at her side and reaches out to take a fistful of Brigitte's heavy wool sweater at her shoulder and tugs, but it doesn’t work, so she finally takes both Brigitte’s arms and brings her up to half-sitting.</p><p>Brigitte’s gasping hard like she can barely get air, but she <em>is</em> still breathing, Trina thinks. She just has huge blown out pupils like she’s stoned as fuck, but Brigitte Fitzgerald would never. Trina thinks that if this were a movie she could slap her across the face and bring her to, but she doesn’t even take a moment to consider it. Instead she meets her eyes — so freaked out she looks almost wild — and Trina sees something she recognizes. It’s the crushing weight of panic she feels when she thinks too hard about her future, and university, and making good grades, and not having real friends at all, ever. And maybe she thought that Fitzgerald didn’t actually feel anything until like, right now.</p><p>“You know you’re fine, right?” she says. “You’re freaking out, just chill, jesus.”</p><p>Brigitte’s eyes are locked on hers for a second, but then she squeezes them shut, presses a shaking hand against her temple, and smears earth from the greenhouse floor against her cheek and Trina exhales, hard and lets herself fall from a crouch to her knees on the cold ground and takes Brigitte’s wrists in both hands, squeezes. “Breathe. Like, just— breathe normally, you’re fine. Okay?” Their eyes meet again and Trina nods. “You’re okay. Right?” She nods and Brigitte mirrors her, and Trina can feel her settle, a little. Enough. She lets her go, but doesn’t get up. Brigitte slowly catches her breath, moves to sit against the wall of planters, and her hands shake so badly when she reaches up to push some of her hair back that Trina actually feels sorry for her.</p><p>They both sit in silence for a minute, maybe two, and when she’s more or less collected, Trina climbs easily to her feet and says “I’ll get him,” and leaves.</p><p>She pushes open the door to his room without knocking and Sam, without looking up from some book or another says “We said no both of us in the back room.”</p><p>“Your freak friend is here,” Trina says. “I called you. Something’s wrong.”</p><p>Sam’s up fast and Trina lets him step past her. She hears him give Brigitte this ‘hey,’ that’s <em>so</em> soft, and jesus, if he thinks he’s fooling anyone...</p><p>She goes into his room, even though she’s not supposed to, and fills a glass from the sink. She still remembers where all the cups are... She brings the water out where Sam’s crouched in front of Brigitte, close, protective. She holds the water out to Sam and he takes it, saying “Thanks, Trina,” and then she backs up, arms folded.</p><p>“Sorry,” Brigitte says. She’s all huddled into herself, this pool of black skirts, and Trina can’t even see her face from where she stands, a few feet away, but watches as she presses her hands up into that protective curtain of her hair, and then she takes the water.</p><p>“What happened?” Sam asks.</p><p>“I dunno— I couldn’t breathe, I dunno.”</p><p>“Probably just a panic attack,” Trina says, and it sounds dismissive. <em>Just a panic attack</em>. “I mean, it seemed like the ones I have,” she amends, and then rolls her eyes. Maybe at herself.</p><p>“Okay,” Sam says, and then to Brigitte, “Here, come on,” and he offer her a hand, which she takes, and he pulls her to her feet. “Okay,” he says, “you wanna come in?”</p><p>“No, I,” Brigitte begins.</p><p>“I’m basically done,” Trina tells Sam, before Brigitte can finish. “Just let me save the document, and then I can close up.”</p><p>Brigitte’s quiet, but Trina thinks that it’s obvious that she came here for a reason. Because of whatever's going on he won't tell her about. Sam licks his lips, uncertain, and then looks at her and Trina shrugs. “I’ve done it before,” she adds, and watches Sam look back at Brigitte. He touches her arm, just above her wrist, through her sweater. It's for a fragment of a second, but Trina notices. “Where’s your coat?” he asks her.</p><p>“Forgot.”</p><p>“Okay,” he says. “C’mon, warm up inside at least.” And she wavers for a second before she slips past him and disappears into the back. She doesn’t close the door. Sam doesn’t follow yet and Trina sighs, gathering all her hair into a ponytail that she lets drop as soon as she drops her arms.</p><p>“She seems pretty freaked,” she says, matter of fact.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Okay so. You should probably go make sure she’s okay,” Trina says, and moves towards the computer.</p><p>“We’re friends, Trina,” Sam says, softly.</p><p>“I <em>really</em> don’t care,” she says, clicking through File, Save on the accounts document, shutting the computer down. She doesn’t look at him.</p><p>“I do, because I don’t want you spreading shit about her. Or this,” he says, softly, waving his arm at the back room.</p><p>“You’re a piece of shit, Sam,” Trina says, before straightening up to look at him, “But you’re good to people when they actually need you. See you Wednesday,” she adds, and goes out to the outer greenhouse to fill out the cashier report before she leaves.</p><p>~</p><p>Later, Trina shuts the lights off in the outer greenhouses. They’re still in the back, but when she goes to get her coat and gloves she can hear their voices. Brigitte’s the one talking, and even though she can’t make out the words from here, it’s more than Trina thinks she’s ever heard her say at once, and something sits tight and warm in her chest, like that feeling smoking pot gives her in her throat.</p><p>Without her friends around, she’s learning how to be honest with herself. </p><p>And she thinks it’s jealousy. Maybe. Outside there’s a flash of lights through the greenhouse tarp. Her mom’s car.</p><p>As quietly as she can, Trina lets herself out, locking up with the spare key in the cash register.</p><p>“How was your day?” her mom asks;</p><p>And Trina leans forward to turn up the song on the radio. “Good,” she lies. “Can we have Chinese food for supper?”</p><p>She still isn’t ready to be honest with other people, yet. Not all the time, anyway.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She thinks she’ll feel stupid, talking to Sam about this. Like, how does she explain their room, and Jason being <em>in it</em>, to him? How does she explain how that feels like sacrilege? But even talking about why their room is meant to be safe doesn’t feel ridiculous, it feels fucking <em>real</em>, and she doesn’t cry when she tells him what happened, but she wants to. </p><p>“I don’t want to go back. It’s like— fucking contaminated now, or something,” she tells him, and Sam’s quiet for a moment before he meets her eyes and says “Well, you can stay here, but—”</p><p>Brigitte holds his gaze, waiting.</p><p>“You should let someone know,” Sam finishes.</p><p>“Do you mind?” she asks. “If I stay?”</p><p>“‘Course I don't,” he tells her. “You're scheduled to do hours here tomorrow anyway. If you’re up for it.”</p><p>Brigitte draws her knees closer to her on the couch and frowns down at the black crisscross weave of her tights. “Sorry I freaked.”</p><p>“Don’t be sorry.”</p><p>She exhales and says “Trina was almost nice.”</p><p>“She can be. Sometimes.”</p><p>And Brigitte thinks that she could tell him how the greenhouse doesn’t feel safe, when Trina’s here, doesn’t feel protective, but she doesn’t, because that, somehow, doesn’t feel fair. </p><p>“Pamela won’t notice if I’m not home,” she tells him. “She never comes into our room,” and she feels, all over again, the heated sickness in her gut when she thinks of <em>Jason McCardy</em> being there, between their beds, standing like he belonged.</p><p>“Wish you’d call, though,” Sam tells her.</p><p>So, with an eye rolls, she does, and it’s not until the phone’s ringing that she wonders if Pamela will even let her. But Pamela’s met Sam, and that, she hopes will be enough.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>He busies himself while she calls, but it’s a small space and hard not to overhear. He actually slips out to the outer greenhouses to double-check that Trina’s locked the doors, and that the till is closed, but of course everything's done perfectly, it's Trina. He takes the glass in from the edge of the planter and steps back inside to put it in the sink just as Brigitte hangs up.</p><p>“What’s the word?”</p><p>“S’fine,” Brigitte says, writing something down on the spiral notebook he keeps by the phone for messages and orders. “She said call if anything… I told her I didn’t feel good, so. I dunno, if I die or something, you should let her know.”</p><p>Sam laughs softly. “Is that before or after I call 911?”</p><p>“I dunno, Brigitte says, “Play it by ear.”</p><p>He steps up to her side to see what she’s written. It’s her home phone number, and above it in messy handwriting, her name, and it spirals through him strangely like — here’s something… new and real. A way to reach her, for real, so she seems less ethereal.</p><p>
  <em>Brigitte</em><br/>
<em>289…</em>
</p><p>“It’s, oh — spelled the French way.”</p><p>She says, “People always spell it wrong.”</p><p>“It’s nice,” he says, and then feels fucking stupid. “Uh, yeah, I never would’ve spelled it like that.”</p><p>“Does anyone ever call you Sampson, instead of Samuel?” she asks, halfway to mischievous.</p><p>“Jesus christ,” Sam says. “No. It’s not fucking 1930…”</p><p>They’re both still for a moment, the two of them against the whole evening, and Sam feels suddenly very small and very real, and very human. He clears his throat. “Um. Hungry?”</p><p>“I feel weird,” she says. “Like shaky.”</p><p>“You should eat,” he tells her. “I don’t have much but… I dunno, pasta…?”</p><p>They eat on the couch, side by side and he shares his cigarettes with her, later, on the front step. It’s wicked cold, but you can see the stars out here on the fringes, like you can’t in the suburbs. And he thinks she’s so, so easy to be around, and he thinks he wants her around more than she is, and he knows, suddenly, where thoughts like those are headed and he thinks <em>Shit</em>. It means he lied to Trina earlier, when he said they were friends, but it's also not like he knew already. Or maybe he did, and he was just lying to himself.</p><p>“You want,” he asks her, “the bed or the couch?” </p><p>“Couch,” she says without hesitation, and so he makes it up for her, but they don’t sleep yet. He gets the feeling she’s not ready to be alone with her thoughts, yet, so they leave the TV on low and just talk, and he wonders how she can be so soft and so fierce at once. How she can care <em>so</em> <em>much</em> underneath that façade of being so totally unaffected by life, and what it means to live it.</p><p>They both fall asleep somewhere around three in the morning, and he wakes up to the coloured bars of the SMPTE test on the tv screen — some liminal space between programs, and Brigitte curled into herself on the other end of the couch, fast asleep. Sam shuts off the TV, then gets up slow and carefully drops one one of the blankets over her before he heads to his own bed and wishes he could fall asleep again, but he can’t.</p><p>Because if this feeling he has for her really is bigger than he thought, at first... well, it’s just that Trina’s right: he’s shit and he knows it. He’s not good for her, or Trina, or anyone, really. Because Sam only really knows how to use people, and how to be used — isn’t that how it goes, after all? Isn’t that how it’s always gone?</p><p>It’s just that… that it doesn’t feel that way with Brigitte. It feels like maybe he could be good, for once. Like maybe he already is. Enough for her. And if he was a better person, maybe it would feel like enough for him, too.</p><p>He resolves to shut it down, anyway, whatever this is. They’re friends. They’re friends, and he feels something for her, but she needs a friend more than anything, so that’s what he intends to be.</p><p>Maybe he could just not be as asshole for once in his life. </p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She sleeps hard, there on Sam’s couch, the way that children do. Blink and it’s morning. To be fair, she did only sleep about three hours. The sun’s just rising when she sits up. Sam’s in bed with his back to her, breathing heavily in sleep. Her watch says it’s just past six. She normally wouldn’t get here until eight or nine, and suddenly she’s overwhelmed with these in-between hours. She pushes the blanket down with one arm, one she doesn’t remember using last night so— her eyes flicker to Sam again, and she thinks <em>oh</em>.</p><p>She makes coffee and pokes through his books, finally extracting one from the pile like a Jenga block and finds her place again on his couch.</p><p>Sam sits up a little less than an hour later, sort of fast like he’s remembered all at once that he’s not alone here. “Morning,” he says, sleep-soft, and she drops her eyes to her book — his — because it’s strange, suddenly, intimate — his hair in his eyes, and the way he looks smaller in just his undershirt — without layers of too-big t-shirts and button downs, and she thinks, for the first time, that he puts layers between himself and the world, too. Just like she does. And she thinks he hasn’t, now, even with her here in his space, in his room. Like he doesn’t need to protect himself from her. </p><p>She says “Hey,” and then looks up.</p><p>He rubs his face, waking up. “How’re you doing?”</p><p>She shrugs, but he’s not looking, so she adds “Okay.”</p><p>He shifts, sitting on the edge of his bed, still in his jeans from yesterday. “Is there more coffee?” he asks her after a moment. </p><p>“Yeah, I left some,” she says, and she thinks about how she doesn’t feel out of place here. Doesn’t feel like maybe she is and isn’t allowed to do certain things, the way she does, sometimes, in her and Ginger’s room. As sacred as it is, sometimes she has to move carefully, so she doesn’t disrupt the space. Sometimes the strangest things set Ginger on edge. It’s the same way she’s careful about what she says and how she acts, so that she fits into the world Ginger made for them. She doesn’t feel like that, here, she realizes suddenly. It didn’t occur to her that maybe Sam wouldn’t want her to make her own coffee or move his books. She slept better here than she has in months at home, where worry seems to burrow into her sleep until she’s become intimate with far too many darkened hours of the night.</p><p>Sam comes to the couch with his cup and takes up his spot from the night before. “What are you reading?” he asks, her, and she shows him. It’s Thomas Harris’s <em>Red Dragon.</em></p><p>“Jesus, that book fucked me up, he says.</p><p>“Is this the same Hannibal Lecter guy that’s in the movie?” she asks him.</p><p>“Yeah. But he’s more in the other books, though.”</p><p>“Do you have those ones?” she asks. </p><p>“Nah. I didn’t much like this one, so.”</p><p>She folds the book closed and sets it on the couch between them.</p><p>“Hey,” he says, “What d’you say we don’t do this today? Like, the greenhouse.”</p><p>“And do what?” she asks.</p><p>“I dunno,” he tells her. “I know this used bookstore. The guy sometimes puts things away for me.”</p><p>“In exchange for weed?”</p><p>“You know, I do have <em>some</em> personal interactions that aren’t based in selling plants,” Sam says in mock indignation.</p><p>“Sorry.”</p><p>“Or. Well, he might be the only one, actually,” Sam tells her, only half-joking.</p><p>“And me, right?” Brigitte asks, feeling unnaturally brave. Sam looks up up her like that means something and she catches her breath.</p><p>He breathes this soft laugh and he can’t quite hold her eyes when he says “Jesus, some days you’re why I get up in the morning.”</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p><em>Fuck, that’s heavy</em>, he thinks. He didn’t mean for it to come out like that. “Sorry,” he says, shaking his head, like he can just wipe that moment out of existence. Jesus, what the fuck was he thinking?</p><p>“No,” she says, “I get that.”</p><p>“It’s not like I’m—… I just like… this. I dunno. Seeing you. Without the threat of impending supernatural transformations hanging over our heads. I’m not trying to— you don’t have to feel obligated—”</p><p>“I don’t,” she says. “Feel obligated. I get it. I know," and she's got that unshakeable certainty that he has only caught glimpses of, but christ, sometimes it really does make him feel... grounded.</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“Sometimes it’s easier to base everything on other people,” she says, “so that you don’t have to think about what you want.”</p><p>“Not healthy though,” he says.</p><p>She shakes her head a little, half agreeing, but says “I’m not perfect, either. My head’s totally fucked up.”</p><p>“You’re doing okay, though,” Sam tells her, soft and it’s another one of those long, aching moments that stretch out and out, waiting. But Sam takes a breath and looks away before—</p><p>“So. Plants or bookstore.”</p><p>“Hm, bookstore.”</p><p>“Okay,” he says. “Also, thanks. For not— for getting it, I dunno.”</p><p>“Thanks for being the only other person I can relate to.” she says, and he knows that in this case <em>other</em> means <em>Ginger first</em>. Always Ginger first. Even when she talked about last night, how furious she was with her sister, how betrayed, Sam’s floored by how much Brigitte obviously loves her. So much so that he half thinks it’s something he should stay far the fuck away from.</p><p>But it’s Brigitte. And so he can’t.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. split | mend</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>JASON</strong>
</p><p>He’s going to have to sell his fucking car, because everything important that’s happened to him this whole goddamn school year has happened <em>in</em> it. The night he and Ginger first had sex which — well, just kinda slightly tainted now because that the was the night that she changed him, or that he got changed — she swears she didn’t know, and he believes her. He believes her because what the fuck was she supposed to think? He also told himself that whatever was happening to him was just… like, who knows, man, maybe… normal? Until he started pissing blood.</p><p>Sometimes there’s something deep inside his gut that aches in this way that’s wrong — like whatever that was, whatever <em>they</em> were, tore him up inside, and now all he’s got is all this fuckin’ scar tissue.</p><p>And now she’s sitting across from him in the passenger seat telling him they’re done.</p><p>“Hey,” he tells her, kind of laughing, and kind of— jesus— “You can’t just decide that.” He has to swallow after he says it, because it’s like— fuck—</p><p>His nose stings, the corners of his eyes. He grits his fucking <em>teeth</em> against it, and it fades away.</p><p>She looks at him just filled to the brim with defiance, raises her eyebrows and says “Well, I already did.”</p><p>“What, because your <em>sister</em>?”</p><p>“No, because I’m fucking bored,” Ginger says. </p><p>Jason scoffs, because that’s some horse shit. She’s not bored, he can tell. Ginger, bored is like a storm cloud in the room. Ginger gets bored and <em>everyone</em> knows it. Or, at least, he does. </p><p>“What?” she asks.</p><p>“You’re not bored, you’re fucking freaked because F— because she got mad at you.” He doesn’t know what it is about her sister, why he can’t call her by her name. Maybe because that makes her a real person, maybe it makes everything he’s done to her, all the bullying, all the threats — it makes it real if she’s real. Maybe he doesn’t like acknowledging the fact that Ginger’s into someone else in a way she will never never be into him.</p><p>“No,” Ginger says. “I brought you to our room because I wanted to <em>feel</em> something else, change the environment, I dunno…” she looks down at her nails and starts picking at one with a raw edge. “Anyway, it didn’t work.”</p><p>“If you wanna feel something else, maybe we should actually have sex again,” Jason snaps, and it passes his teeth as dangerously hot as it feels in his gut and Ginger’s head snaps up and her eyes are narrow. She looks, he thinks sometimes, still half-feral. Like maybe they didn’t get all of the monster out. Sometimes he looks for it in his own blue eyes, when he’s alone, and only when fluorescents or sunlight diffuses everything so that there’s not a shadow to be seen… because, if he’s honest, he’s terrified to find it in himself. He thinks it’d win in him in a way it didn’t with Ginger. Ginger like— she talks about the monster like she assimilated it, like they blended. With Jason it was oil and water, all this blackness smothering what was <em>him</em> in him out until he was drowning. </p><p>“I already said no,” Ginger says, very softly. “And anyway, it’s not a fucking discussion. You and me are done.”</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>And Jason is <em>seething</em>, she can see it, feel it in the air like electricity, but there’s something else there, too, in the way he won’t look at her. He’s sad, too. And she’s fucking sad, because the words on her tongue are so ludicrous and so stupid that she can barely even think them in her head — even though she wants it, wants to ask him: <em>can’t we be friends? </em></p><p>And that’s the worst thing. She does want to be friends. Jason, for all his ignorant, bumbling bravado, for all his cat-calling and awkward hands, and the way he pants against her skin when she touches him in a way she finds kind of ridiculous and gross — for all of that, he’s also funny and gentle and thoughtful. He listens to her, when things are different — when she’s not breaking up with him. He <em>gets</em> her in a way, she knows, no one else ever will again, because he was losing himself, too, to the wolf. And suddenly she wants to cry but she knows, too, that she’s looking for something in Jason that he doesn’t have. And she knows that she’ll burn everything in him away to find it if she stays, just like she was doing to Bee.</p><p>It would be nice, though, she thinks, to say it was just because she was trying to save him from her excesses, but it’s not just that. She <em>is</em> bored. And she’s bored with Bee, too, sometimes, as much as it makes her sick to realize it. But, jesus fuck, sometimes she wants to talk about what it’s like to be touched to the point of shuddering release, and sometimes she wants to know if anyone else feels it as strongly as she does or if there’s something wrong with her — something wrong with her for wanting it so much in the first place, still, even though she’s just her now, and not a monster. </p><p>Christ, though, she feels like one. </p><p>“Fine,” Jason says, and the finality of it shocks her, and every gentle thing she wanted to say, was half thinking about, is just blow from her mind like dried leaves from a gutter, leaving her feeling hollowed out.</p><p>“Fine,” she echoes, and she reaches for the handle and gets out of the car before he can tell her to do it, because she sure as fuck isn’t letting him have the last word, except—</p><p>“Bitch!” he calls after her, and his voice is raw enough that she realizes that he’s probably crying. And <em>You know what?</em> she thinks <em>it’s not worth it</em>, so she doesn’t turn back, doesn’t say anything. She just lets her feet, and the beating of her traitorous heart take her in the direction of home which has, she knows, always just been Brigitte.</p><p>But Brigitte isn’t there when she gets back to their room. And Ginger waits and waits and she doesn’t fall asleep until morning and by morning Brigitte is still gone.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She likes the bookstore. It’s empty at this time of the morning, except for the guy behind the desk that Sam knows — a man in his 70s, but the kind of 70 that seems unshakeable and ageless, named John or Jim or something she didn’t catch. He ropes Sam into a conversation while holding whatever books he’s set aside for him captive but Sam doesn’t seem to mind that much, and that leaves Brigitte to wander off towards the back. They’re all used books, the smell of old paper almost overwhelming, and she’s glad for their voices up front because the floors are uneven and creaky, and she feels like the silence would be unbearable if it were just her moving around. </p><p>She sees why Sam likes this place. There’s a disorder to everything that seems somehow the antithesis of chaotic. Like <em>of course that would be there</em>, except there’s no real logic. Books on wild mushrooms sit alongside the cookbooks, and mingled with those, there’s volumes that seem impossibly old — cloth-bound — that fall open to favourite pages in the palm of her hand: French-Canadian recipes, how to skin a hare, and how to grow things in Canadian seasons that are all harsher and more unpredictable than other places. There’s a history section that’s impossibly mixed up, and she switches the placement of some books so that they’re more alphabetical, but it’s a hopeless endeavour unless she wants to start hauling out volume after volume to make the proper space, so she doesn’t. </p><p>When the voices fall silent up front, she doesn’t notice, her nose buried in a book of fairy tales that read like ghost stories. Sam finds her, but doesn’t say anything, just drops to a crouch at her side to go through books on the lower shelves, and they spend maybe an hour there, just in silence and it settles something in her she didn’t know was aching.</p><p>Later, out on the street, the sunlight on the snow positively blinding, Sam asks her if she wants to go home and she says “Kind of no,” and he breathes this laugh and looks at her in this strange, still way like he wants to reach out — touch her — but he doesn’t, and all at once, her eyes stinging from the brightness of everything, she realizes that she wanted him to. Wants him to… to just reach out to her… and whatever comes after that.</p><p>But it’s the after that she’s afraid of. Like, she wants the moment, but she wants it trapped in some liminal space, where it happened in a place that’s hers alone. Where it happened, but it doesn’t alter… everything. Because she doesn’t know who she is if she’s someone who lets guys so close to her. If she’s someone who lets <em>anyone</em> so close to her, other than Ginger. And she doesn’t know what it will mean for how the rest of the world sees her, either. Or how she sees herself.</p><p>And Brigitte wonders where Ginger is right now, and what she’s doing, and she wishes that they had the kind of freedom that Sam does — able to drive to little towns she’s never seen — and she thinks maybe if she and Ginger could do that, everything would be a little bit easier, a little bit more real.</p><p>“Hey,” she says to him. “Can you teach me how to drive?”</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>They agree on the spring, when the roads are less slippery, and you can actually pull over onto the shoulder of the backroads. As it stands, snow’s piled high, everywhere right now. And he’s surprised, kind of, but the more he thinks about it the more he realizes that it makes sense. After all, they’re taking off, these girls, and you can’t get that far in Canada without a car. Hell, you can’t get that far in <em>Ontario</em> — it’s too vast, too far between places, and public transit only exists in the cities. The bus in Bailey Downs never leaves Bailey Downs. Sam feels like it’s probably like that everywhere but, yeah, he knows what it’s like to feel trapped.</p><p>After he drops her off, he tries not to think that he’s maybe just a means to an end, for her. A way to escape this place. He tries not to think of the ways they’re maybe, probably, using each other, and he wonders if fucking anyone has friendships where they aren’t. Is he the one that’s fucked up? Do other people navigate this territory of human closeness without being fundamentally selfish? He honestly doesn’t remember.</p><p>Sometimes he wonders where he went wrong. Why he ended up the county dealer, why he’s such an asshole. Sometimes he thinks he can blame his parents, or their deaths. People fell away from him when his mom died, he remember that, but he’d only been in elementary school then. If he’s honest, he doesn’t remember much of that time — being eight or nine. Maybe he blocked it out, or maybe he’s just smoked too much pot, but it’s all a haze. He remember a sense of isolation though. That’s when it started. And by the time he graduated, people who had been friends — ended up were just friends by convenience. The same school hallways, the same classes, the same half-reckless interest in heady clouds of smoke and shitty beer and pretty girls. Out of high school, all that started to disintegrate. And then his dad died and Sam was suddenly saddled with the greenhouse and bills and rent and real life crashed in around him like a building on fire. Suddenly he was a world away from everyone he knew, and he can’t even blame them for stepping quietly out of his life. Besides, they weren’t close in any meaningful sense of the word. These days, he barely remembers their names.</p><p>He knows, somewhere inside, that the people he hooked up with in the weird, seasick swell of turning twenty, twenty-one were just a means to an end. A way to fill the void when the thoughts in his head got to be too loud — the fucked up thoughts, the thoughts that said <em>We all turn into our parents.</em> They were women he met dealing, usually. Girls at college parties and women slightly older, but still hanging onto that scene. The ones who would lean close to shout over the music “Wanna get outta here?” and he usually did. There’s a mess of unfamiliar bedrooms, living rooms — always half-dark, and then that one time, behind the club where he wasn’t selling anything at all, and rent was overdue, and he was sick with anxiety, and so he sucked some guy off for fifty bucks and then had to go get a goddamn STD test at the clinic after (and then get tested a handful more times, for six more months) because they hadn’t used a condom, and it hadn’t even occurred to him at the time, that he should. </p><p>He was lucky, but in case he wasn’t, he didn’t hook up with anyone until he was sure he was clean. And then time swirled inwards and inwards like water down a slow drain, all of it meaningless until suddenly he was twenty-two, and desperately lonely, and suddenly there was Trina. Who for all her chemical lipgloss and eyeshadow glitter that he would find on his skin and in his sheets for months, was — beneath her cheerful, cheerleader smiles and her affected posturing — genuinely caring, responsible, and honest. It’s such a goddamn shame, Sam thinks, that no one lets her be like that at school. But Trina’s also selfish, and her self-defensiveness makes her mean, but if you asked him, honestly, if he gave a shit about her, he’d have to say yes. But they weren’t compatible, not by a long shot, and he’s not upset to have ended it. </p><p>Sam thinks he ought to stop living though the vibrancy of spirited women, and that kind of fierceness you can only achieve when you think all the world’s against you, but Trina woke something in him he’d forgotten. The fact that he could still care about other people. And most of the time it was self-serving but, sometimes, it wasn’t. Sometimes he still looks at Trina and thinks that she deserves the fucking world, because she fights so hard for it. She made him realize he wasn’t just a shell, a warm body to press against, a hot mouth. That he was worth caring about, too, however much he might not have deserved it. </p><p>The thing he feels for Brigitte though, that’s different. Has been from the start. He sees Brigitte in a way he’s never seen anyone else, intensely luminously alive in spite of all the reminders of death she carries on her person — her femur pen, her bird skull necklace, her swathes of black. She’s a force of nature, and she has no earthly idea because everyone around her that matters has tamped her down and down again. He doesn’t know how the fuck to tell a girl that she’s like weeds — tenacious and self-willed and always back, every time he turns around. And it’s this feeling that fucking fills him up — makes him feel light and stops his breath all at once.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She stays at Sam’s again that night because she doesn’t think she can stomach the thought of sleeping in her own bed after Jason was in their room. It feels like a violation — more, somehow, than what he did to her in the janitor’s closet at school, the threat of it. And lately, being with Ginger has been… it’s like she’s standing in a room filled with gas, trying hard not to make a spark.</p><p>With Sam, moments slide easily, one into another. After supper, they stand shoulder to shoulder at his kitchen sink while he washes the dishes and she dries them, and they are quiet, and it’s… nice. He’s warm, she notices that, the line of his arm this stripe of warmth against hers. She notices, not for the first time, the black orchid that she’d caused him to break accidentally. It sits takes up some of the extremely limited kitchen counter space he has, still propped up with its stick, but growing, still. The soft orangey glow of the kitchen light makes the petals look impossibly dark, and she thinks, suddenly, of the hellebore plant at home and remembers that she has obligations elsewhere.</p><p>Ginger…</p><p>She wonders what they did, after she left. She wonders if they just went back into the room. She wonders if Jason knows the secrets of that space now — the countdown calendar, the Pact, the scarab beetles and everything they represent. She wonders if he knows they made those purple bead curtains, hours and hours stringing beads, sometimes breathless with laughter like their fingers didn’t ache, like their muscles weren’t stiff and sore from the cold basement floor.</p><p>She sleeps on the couch again, in a cocoon of blankets that smell so much like the greenhouse and also, she thinks, tobacco, but the kind that’s too wet and living, still, to smoke and she wonders what Ginger is doing now, and if she’s still with Jason, and if, when they see each other again, if they’ll be fighting. She knows she’s still furious, betrayed, but it’s never enough to make her want to be away from her, and yet, here she is… away.</p><p>~</p><p>The next day, Sam takes her home early, before Trina shows up for work. It’s so early that the sun is only just starting to come up as she gets out into her shoveled driveway, and it hits the windows of her house colouring them opaquely orange.</p><p>It feels strange when she walks inside. Not bad strange, it’s just that, maybe, she’s never come home at this time before — not that she can remember. And it’s so quiet everywhere that she can hear Sam pull back out onto the street. She takes off her boots by the front door so she doesn’t disrupt the silence, and pads downstairs, the floor beneath her socks feels like it gets colder and colder with each step down to the basement. </p><p>As she steps into their room, Ginger startles her, huddled at the headboard of her head, blankets pulled up around her shoulders. She sniffles and for a moment, before Brigitte registers what she’s seeing, her heart leaps into her throat. She doesn’t think she jumps too badly, but the peacefulness slips from her fingers all at once. Ginger’s crying.</p><p>“Ginge?” Brigitte says, and Ginger gasps, startled too, as she looks up.</p><p>There’s a beat, and then Ginger says “Don’t need to ask where you were,” and there’s an edge to her voice that disrupts the bitterness of the statement. Anyway, Brigitte thinks, it’s true. Where else does she ever go?</p><p>“What’s wrong?”</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>“What’s wrong?” Brigitte asks, and Ginger realizes that she can’t even say it because it sounds so goddamn stupid — that she broke up with Jason. That she’s a girl that breaks up with anyone. And Brigitte will think it’s stupid, but fuck — it <em>hurts</em> — and not so much because she loved him, she didn’t, but because she lost something, an understanding, that only he could give her. That only he would ever be able to give her. This brings on a fresh flood of furious tears and Ginger digs around in her blanket for the balled up kleenex she was using and then suddenly Brigitte is there. </p><p>“Move,” Brigitte says, and Ginger does, and Brigitte digs around in the blankets, finds the kleenex and hands it to her like that’s not disgusting, like it’s not covered in snot and tears, and then she finds the opening to Ginger’s side, and crawls into them with her. There’s not quite that much to go around, so she drags some of the other bedsheets up, too. The bedsprings creak beneath them, and the headboard is hard and painful against Ginger’s back in spite of the comforter around them. It’s fucking cold down here, but Brigitte’s warm which means she must not have walked home. Ginger didn’t even hear her come in.</p><p>Ginger wipes at her tears and Brigitte’s so still and so quiet beside her, waiting and patient. And so Ginger tells her because — although there’s no one in the world worse than her sister to know she’s crying about a boy — she trust her more than anyone else, too. Trusts her to still see her in a way that’s, somehow, good. And Brigitte doesn’t say anything as Ginger tells her how it went, keeping her voice low and even.</p><p>“If you didn’t like him, why’re you so sad?” Brigitte whispers, like she’s afraid of not understanding, afraid that Ginger will act like she’s an idiot which, fair, she’s done, lately. 

</p><p>“I dunno… he knew what it was like. I’ll never find anyone else who knew what it was like, because—” she gasps sharply and then suddenly she can barely get the words out. “Like sometimes it was so good, and I was so powerful like nothing could touch me, like— I could do anything, go anywhere without constantly checking over my shoulder for danger. Like— we’re just told over and over how fucked up the world is for girls, and I was the most fucked up thing, suddenly, I was in control.”</p><p>And she sees Brigitte shift, her tongue sliding out against her lower lip, but she says nothing.</p><p>“Oh, you don’t think so,” Ginger says. “See, I told you. You don’t get it.”</p><p>“I—”</p><p>“You were infected, too, and you were so good,” Ginger says. “So fucking controlled, and I can’t be like that! I can’t be like this. And I couldn’t be a goddamn monster, either, so what the fuck am I s’posed to do, Bee? What’s wrong with me?”</p><p>“Nothing!” Brigitte whispers, and then, “And I dunno. But we’re leaving soon. Everything will be different.”</p><p>Ginger laughs hollowly. “Where? How?”</p><p>Brigitte shifts, enough to look at her. “I dunno where, but I have money. From the greenhouse, from working there.”</p><p>For a moment they just look at each other, and Ginger feels her eyes narrow, feels the distrust that bubbles up in her, because she <em>does not like</em> that guy. </p><p>“He pays you?”</p><p>“It’s nothing,” Brigitte says. “Since Henry left…”</p><p>“But it’s volunteer.”</p><p>Brigitte mirrors Ginger’s expression, her eyes narrowing. “Does it matter? I gave some of the money to Pamela, but we— there’s enough. In a few more months, I dunno… we can still be out by sixteen. Ginger… right?”</p><p>“…Yeah,” Ginger whispers. Because suddenly it’s real. There’s money, there’s… not a plan, but Brigitte’s doing this, working for this. Brigitte’s in, really in…</p><p>So why does she feel so anxious?</p><p>“Anyway,” Brigitte says, “Fuck Jason, let’s just… focus on getting out of here, all right?”</p><p>Ginger bites her lip, eyes on her sister. “Yeah,” she says, softly, even as something in her tugs her in the opposite direction.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She gets the sense that Ginger was up all night, or at least most of it. Eventually she slides down to lay on the mattress and Brigitte follows her down, even though it’s the time they would normally get up. They lie so close, face to face, and it’s so warm, that she thinks she could fall asleep again, even though she’s not that tired. Ginger’s fingers brush against the inside of her arm and Brigitte closes her eyes and sighs. Sometimes she feels like Ginger has this power to pull everything tight and bad and anxious out of her, just by standing close. She feels like she’s spent hours and hours of her life, just trying to get close enough to Ginger to feel it. But they always have to move apart. Sisters, she thinks, don’t feel this, and she’s always prided herself on being different, and although she knows that maybe it’s… strange… she can’t ever really bring herself to care.</p><p>When she opens her eyes again, Ginger’s watching her, and Brigitte is close enough to count her freckles. Brigitte has them, too, across her nose, but they’re so faint that she often forgets. They show up past the peak of summer and fade to almost nothing by the time it rolls around again. Ginger’s though, are perfect and delicate, and scattered all over her face. Brigitte feels like hers are splotchy by comparison. She says “When… things were all so fucked up, before? Like, before Halloween, Jason pushed me into the janitor’s closet at school…” she shuts her eyes again, before she can see the expression on Ginger’s face, but then she’s right there again, and so she opens them, but keeps her gaze down. “He shoved me into the racks of stuff, and…” she takes a deep breath and feels something flinch inside her, feels her shoulders lock into stiffness. “He was looking for you because— because he was changing, he wanted to know why…”</p><p>“When?”</p><p>“Before… before Halloween, I dunno.” She looks up, but only long enough to say. “After he killed his dog?” And that, she thinks, seems to register with Ginger and she looks away again. She feels how shallowly she’s breathing and tries to regulate it. “Um… he shut the door. He… shut the door and I though <em>oh, fuck,</em> because—”</p><p>Because that’s how it goes…</p><p>“Bee…”</p><p>“He didn’t do anything,” Brigitte says, looking up. “But it felt… like…” And fuck, she doesn’t know why <em>she</em> starts tearing up, because it was months ago, and she’s thought about it, but saying it out loud makes it different. Saying it out loud, saying what she thought was going to happen… She squeezes her eyes shut so that she doesn’t cry. “He grabbed my face, and there was blood on his hands, and on his chest like— from his dog I guess… I thought, I dunno…”</p><p>And somehow, lately, death and hurt and sex has been all wrapped up into one thing. Ginger and Jason, that first time and killing Norman. Jason in the janitor’s closet — far too close for comfort, and she didn’t know if he was going to kill her or try to— and the way Ginger had clamoured over her in the school hallway, telling her she should come along for the ride…</p><p>“Did he hurt you?”</p><p>“He grabbed my face,” she says again. “But no… nothing happened.” But still, she feels fucked up about it. She doesn’t know why.</p><p>“I’ll fucking kill him,” Ginger whispers.</p><p>“I just want to forget it,” Brigitte whispers back.</p><p>And Ginger wraps her arms around her so fucking tight and Brigitte feels her breath escape her once, fast, but she’s not crying. She won’t.</p><p>“Why didn’t you tell me?”</p><p>“…You weren’t you back then.”</p><p>And Ginger holds her tighter and says, so soft Brigitte almost doesn’t hear her, “But I think I was.”</p><p>“Sorry.”</p><p>“The fuck for?”</p><p>“I wanted to. Tell.”</p><p>And suddenly Ginger’s hands are on her face, and she’s holding her tight but it is so so different from Jason, and Ginger makes her meet her eyes. “From now on we tell each other everything,” she says, and she says it so fiercely that Brigitte can’t even remind her that that’s what they were meant to be doing in the first place. </p><p>But it’s there again, a promise. And she means it when she nods her head. Ginger’s fingers snag in her hair as they push it back and then she’s wrapped up in her again and for the first time in weeks and weeks, when Brigitte sleeps at her own house, she actually sleeps. She doesn’t wake up enveloped in fear.</p><p>~</p><p>When school starts again, after winter break, it’s worse. It’s always worse, but now they’re trapped indoors with the other kids, all that snow and ice and frigid air finally setting in to stay. Brigitte sometimes can’t believe Ontario winters exist. Some days she can’t imagine it ever being warm again, and then, all at once, she’s surrounded by the disgustingly humid heat of summer, sweat dripping down her ribcage drop by drop beneath her dresses and blouses, and she can’t remember it ever being so cold.</p><p>She misses fall, always, but since last October, it feels like a stranger to her. She feels, these days, like everything is normal, only everything’s just slightly off. Sounds meet her ears with the slightest change in frequency, she feels like everything around her exists with such intensity it almost seems to vibrate, but it feels off. Like the world isn’t what she thought it was, and she’s not who she thought she was, either, and sometimes being at Ginger’s side feels tedious and barbed, and she has to watch her step and where she puts her hands and it’s not because Ginger’s the one that’s hurting her, it’s that she feels like she’s pretending with her, too. Pretending to be the Brigitte that could walk into her garage and see a hundred ways to die, who plotted revenge on Trina Sinclair, who let herself cave under her sister’s every whim.</p><p>She’s different, now, and she doesn’t know when or how it happened, or even where, inside her, that difference sits, but it makes her feel, sometimes, both solid and and weightless or — no, untethered — and it scares her, because she’s always known just how to hold herself and how to speak to be translucent, but now she’s starting to exist. It’s easy to swat at ephemeral impulses, turn them into nothing, but now she has — so much — this pull and longing inside her, this wild, tactile want. Like everything is suddenly so goddamn real, and she’s real in it. Like maybe she’s finally letting herself live on her own terms, and not anyone else’s, and it feels like losing her footing at the top of a slope, the ground giving way underneath, and she doesn’t know how fast she’s gonna slip, or when, or what’s at the bottom — only that it’s reckless and free, and all she can do is grasp wildly for something to hang onto to stop her fall, even as she half wants to let go. She’s getting so, so tired of always clinging to the ties that bind her. It’s like: freedom awaits, but what if she just explodes apart? What if she turns monster, like Ginger did, all ache and want, and it doesn’t matter what happens to anyone else as long as she gets what she wants. What does she want? She feels like the centre of her is vibrating like a wire, always, waiting, ‘cause what if—</p><p>What if— fuck— what if everything they’ve told her is wrong, and a girl can be more than a bitch, a tease, a virgin, more than a monster… What if she can be, like… not Ginger’s, not anyone’s, but just hers, alone?</p><p>~</p><p>Ginger’s finally decided to do her community involvement (with Pamela at her new office, and Brigitte’s been hearing her whine and moan about it for so many days that even Ginger’s sick of hearing herself, and it become a running joke between them). Ginger takes the bus out past the strip mall and almost into the city proper, and she’s there until Pamela drives her home at five-thirty, which leaves Brigitte’s Thursday afternoons totally free. She usually walks to the bus stop with Ginger where they shiver and drink hot chocolate or tea that’s cold practically the second they step outside, and then the bus comes and Brigitte’s left to dispose of the dregs in the cup and do something with herself.</p><p>After winter break, Thursdays are also a Trina day at the greenhouse and so Brigitte tends to avoid the place, but, today, she’s home, with her class notes spread over the dining room table before she realizes she must have forgotten her chem textbook at Sam’s, and she needs it. She stands, undecided, in the dining room — the blood in her legs still itchy, now that it’s flowing properly again in the warmth of the house — and she considers how badly she actually does need the book: Enough to warrant the forty-minute walk to the greenhouse and back in the cold — or if she can just wing the test tomorrow. </p><p>In the end she decides she needs it, which is how she ends up walking into the greenhouse on a Trina day in the middle of February.</p><p>Trina’s at the cash, somehow the brightest thing in the place — this orange sweater, sunny hair against all that green, and Brigitte almost turns around and walks out again.</p><p>Trina looks up from the pots she’s wrapping in paper and says “He’s not here,” like that’s the only thing Brigitte might have shown for. She doesn’t say anything, just rolls her eyes away from Trina’s and stalks towards the back, because if her book’s here, it’s probably in the back. She can just grab it and go.</p><p>The door isn’t locked, which is unsurprising — that’s where bathroom is, simultaneously his and the staff bathroom, which, really, is just Brigitte and Trina. Her book is exactly where she thought it would be, on the coffee table, pushed slightly to one side like he knew she’d show for it. She grabs it and turns to go.</p><p>Trina’s still wrapping up terracotta pots, but that’s not what stops her. It’s the voice of the man she’s ringing up, all self-importance, and the way he asks her “How much they pay you here, sweetheart?”</p><p>And Brigitte sees Trina’s shoulders tense in a mirror image of Brigitte’s own.</p><p>“They don’t,” Trina says, “it’s community involvement.”</p><p>“It’s what?”</p><p>“It’s volunteer,” Trina clarifies, and for a split second, the smallest fraction of time, Trina’s eyes flicker to hers as Brigitte passes.</p><p>“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asks, and leans on the counter. Brigitte stops, with her fingers on the door handle to leave, and Trina looks up at him, simultaneously drawing back, but she’s clinging to her customer service smile as she says “Is that everything, today?”</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>The guy doesn’t even reach for his wallet. He’s just looking and Trina stands there, trapped behind the cash, frozen, but she feels her smile fall. She says, soft, “Cash or card?” and her heartbeat is pounding in her fucking throat.</p><p>“I asked you a question,” he says, and Trina’s trying to calculate how long Sam’s been gone and when he might come back and what she’s supposed to fucking do about this in the mean time when there’s this flutter of dark to her left, and suddenly the paper-wrapped pot is tugged gently from her fingers, and Trina has to consciously let go. Fitzgerald silently puts everything into a bag, looks up at the guy with this burning expression and says, voice dry as bones, “That’s nine eighty-eight.”</p><p>The guy straightens up, silently. Digs out his wallet like he wasn’t just some gross forty-year old dude propositioning young girls, and pays up. Then he leaves. Neither Brigitte or Trina move from behind the cash, but when Trina looks down, she sees that Brigitte’s hands are shaking as she reaches to pick up her chem book again.</p><p>And there’s something about teenage girls, Trina thinks, that’s totally skewed because she doesn’t know how she can hate her and want to hug her at once, with equal intensity. She doesn’t know why they’re both so fucking freaked, because it was tame, looking back, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt worse, and for a moment Trina had thought she was alone here, just her and that guy. She takes a breath and it hitches slightly. “Thanks,” she says, and it comes out sounding bitchy, but she honestly didn’t mean it to.</p><p>Brigitte shrugs and doesn’t look at her and Trina looks away.</p><p>“When’s Sam get back?” Brigitte asks.</p><p>“I dunno,” Trina says. “It’s debris clearing, so…” They both know how that sentence ends. <em>Hard to say.</em> She watches Brigitte open the chem book, flip through some of the filmy textbook pages, thin as photo paper, then close it again. She opens her mouth twice but no sound comes out and from nowhere, Trina’s got this gut-deep frustration that’s so heavy and intense she’s no even entirely sure it’s her own, just knows that girls aren’t supposed to be like Brigitte Fitzgerald, and she hates that Fitzgerald is that way, anyway.</p><p>“I might stay,” Brigitte says, finally. “And study here, so…”</p><p>And relief floods through Trina so strong she starts shaking all over again, suddenly able to feel the anger that started building in her the moment the guy leaned over her counter, the moment he thought he could fucking talk to her like that, the moment he started <em>thinking</em> whatever he was thinking, and she’s so fucking profoundly grateful for this sliver of solidarity from Fitz — that isn’t an offer or a demand, it just is, that she can only whisper “Whatever,” and their eyes meet, for an instant, and then Brigitte’s hunched over her book and behind her hair, and retreats to the office and comes back with the computer chair. </p><p>She tucks herself up onto it, books spread on the raised planter edge at her side, and they settle into ignoring each other as Trina continues her work, every so often hearing one of Brigitte’s textbook pages flip. No more customers come in, but there’s other things to be done, and neither of them says a word until Sam’s van lights sweep hazily across the floor in the February dim of five-something in the evening.</p><p>Trina watches Fitzgerald look up like she’s only half-here, and half in the land of ionic and covalent bonds, watches her like she’s trying to find something there, something that gives her away, but there’s not. Not even when he comes in, with snow in his hair, and sort of stops. “Uh, hey,” he says, and his voice rises like a question.</p><p>“Hey,” Brigitte says, and just doesn’t offer up an explanation and Sam, who Trina knows better — knows better how to read — wavers between asking and not asking and then turns to her just as she drops her eyes to the open till and starts counting pennies for the cash. He turns to her, she thinks, because she’s always been easy, hasn’t she? Always so willing to offer up anything if it meant he’d stick around. </p><p>“That’s okay,” he says, coming around the counter. “It’s starting to snow, do you have a ride?”</p><p>And she doesn’t, because her mom’s at her art class, and her dad’s on a business trip and Trina shrugs her shoulders and says “Are you offering?” and there’s that — little tiny flicker of movement from Brigitte’s side of the greenhouse where she’s packing up.</p><p>“Sure,” Sam says, like it’s nothing. </p><p>“See you tomorrow,” Brigitte says, and she’s halfway out the door before Sam, lighting a cigarette, says “Hang on,” and she does, but not expectantly. Trina watches everything, tries to figure this — them — out. “I’ll take you,” he finishes.</p><p>She pulls a face. “I gotta do chores before Pamela gets home, so… I’ll walk.”</p><p>And there’s this beat before Sam, voice strange, says “It’s dark,” and Brigitte’s eyes flicker to the night outside and she pushes the door shut and <em>that</em>, Trina thinks, is weird as fuck. But it’s something. It’s something that just passed between them and once, maybe, the dark outside — fringes of the suburbs dark… but what?</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>He knows for a fact that Brigitte’s not getting into that truck with Trina, and Trina wouldn’t want her to. There’s only real space in the front anyway, three side-by-side, so he doesn’t even ask if she’d be willing. He can’t imagine what a nightmare that car ride would be. But this whole evening, suddenly, is weird — both of them here, both of them reserved. It occurs to him that they might have been talking about him, that Trina might have, but then maybe he’s just being self-centred. Either way, both of them can talk about what they want, it just scares him a little. Hearing their story from Trina’s mouth probably wouldn’t be good, but then, Brigitte’s heard him tell it, too — in fragments — and she’s smart enough to figure out how she wants to handle that information. He lets it go. “Wait then,” Sam says. “I’ll take you after. At most you’ll be fifteen minutes later,” and Brigitte hedges, her fingers on the edge of her textbook that’s peeking out of her bag before she pulls it out again, which means she’s staying, and he feels a rush of relief push the anxiety out of his chest. “Lock up,” he tells her.</p><p>Trina, beside him, has already put her coat on, collected her stuff, and she doesn’t say a word, not even after Sam’s started up the van and started backing down the driveway. </p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>“What’s up?” he asks and she glances at him, wondering if she should tell, or if it’ll all go another way. Tell Ben or Jason and they’d ask her what she’d done to lead that creep in the greenhouse on. <em>Press your tits together, sweetheart?</em> She lets out this annoyed little ‘tuh,’ at the ex-friends in her head and leans her temple against the window for a second. This, she reminds herself, is Sam, and even at his worst, he’s only surface-mean with his words. Not like her, where she sometimes feels like the only outlet she has for all her rage is running and field hockey and calling other girls names. “I dunno, some asshole came in,” she says, and her voice shakes and even she doesn’t know if it’s anger or upset. Her chest is <em>burning</em> so she thinks it’s the former. Sam, though, turns off the music which was playing whisper-low anyway, and she doesn’t know if that’s worse or better. He’s quiet, but there’s this vibrating tension. “It was nothing,” Trina says. “He wouldn’t leave and he was hitting on me, it’s stupid,” she says because she thinks that somehow, in all of that, it sounds like she’s bragging. <em>He was hitting on </em>me<em>.</em> Christ, she hates being a girl, and all the convoluted bullshit that comes with it.</p><p>“She’d come over for her book and heard him, and…” Trina rolls her eyes, straightening her back. “She came over behind the cash until he paid and left.”</p><p>“Fuck,” Sam says, and it’s strangely sharp, despite how quietly he says it. It’s cutting. And then: “Okay. Are you okay?”</p><p>“Jesus, Sam, it doesn’t matter,” Trina snaps, but she’d needed to hear it. That he cared, that someone did. That someone was on her side in an encounter that so many people could have made her fault. But Brigitte didn’t. Sam doesn’t. And she reels for a moment, her world tipping on its axis because she can hear the others girls in her head — Steph and Jessica — acting like it was a compliment, belittling her anger until she swallowed it and pretended that that was something she’d wanted all along.</p><p>But of course the fucking Fitz sisters wouldn’t be like those girls. And Trina wonders where the middle ground is, between Brigitte Fitzgerald and Jessica and Stephanie and <em>her</em>, because she doesn’t want to be either. Not anymore.</p><p>“It matters,” Sam says, quietly, and he’s come to some resolution, probably — he always sets about fixing problems right away, with like, no breathing room. She finds it exhausting and overwhelming, because she sometimes can’t even get a grasp on situations before he’d be talking about this or that way to solve it. She wonders how long it’s been, since she knew how she really felt, without someone else’s influence and thinks that she’s felt better since everyone at school stopped speaking to her. She’s felt… just, like, calmer but also hollower, too. Like she was made up of all these other people’s thoughts, and now she has to plunge her hands into this muddy pool of her own mind to pull out what <em>she</em> really thinks, what she feels. When did she start losing herself?</p><p>She can't think about this anymore. Not here in Sam’s van because she’s afraid she’ll talk about it, ask him, search for another person’s opinion like an addiction when she should really be searching for her own. Instead she asks “What’s in the dark?”</p><p>And Sam looks at her, fast, then at the road, and there’s this barely perceptible shift in the speed like he was thinking he should brake. “What?”</p><p>“You said ‘it’s dark.’ Like… I dunno, like it was important.”</p><p>He exhales, almost like easing the tension he’s carrying. “That’s it,” he says. “Who knows what creeps are out there. Also it’s dangerous to walk on the edge of the highway at night, like I <em>know</em> you guys do.”</p><p>“It’s the fastest way, without cutting through the field,” Trina says. “And the snow’s way too high there, to cut through at this time of year. And in summer there’s ticks.”</p><p>“There’s not ticks.”</p><p>“There totally is, Morely used to get them on him all the time. I had to pull them out with tweezers.” She’s quiet, running the backs of her fingernails over her lower lip before she says “D’you think what killed Morely’s still out there?”</p><p>“No,” Sam says, and then, a beat too late. “No more dogs are dying, so.”</p><p>Trina looks over at him, streetlamps flashing orange over his face, colouring his hair and eyes almost black with each pass. “You know what it was, don’t you?” she asks. “You both do.”</p><p>“I know it’s probably long gone,” Sam says. “Only something with a death wish would hang around this place for long.”</p><p>And Trina thinks <em>Fine, don’t tell me</em>, but she’s right. She knows she is.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>The chemistry test is fine, Friday morning, but only takes up half the class. Never a good sign, Brigitte thinks, because it always means group work, leaving the teacher to start marking tests right away. She thinks teachers like that should get fired or like, run over by a train. She thinks it vehemently while she keeps her head down and the teacher pairs them off at random. </p><p>Ginger isn’t in this class. Ginger barely passed basic biology, last year. Even when Brigitte had told her (pleaded, really) that it was just memorization, and it wasn’t that hard, Ginger had only given it two weeks of genuine effort — the two of them quizzing each other from their respective beds, before she just gave up. Ginger’s probably in English class right now, while everyone reads out loud from Hamlet, stilted and bored. Or maybe they’ve graduated to the part where they all just watch the movie.</p><p>“Emily and Cynthia, Devin and Jake,” the teacher drones, moving between rows. Brigitte does her very best to become invisible, but it doesn’t work because he says “Brigitte and Trina,” in this monotone way, like it’s not basically a death sentence, and Brigitte shuts her eyes tight and wonders if she can feign a migraine and go to the nurse's office, but then everyone’s chairs are scraping back all around her as people move to their partner’s desks. </p><p>Trina — who still sits in back with the people she used to hang around with but doesn’t anymore — pulls out the chair next to Brigitte and slams her stuff down like she’s glad to be rid of them or pissed to be with Brigitte or probably both. She smells like vanilla — not in a strong way, but it’s there, like moisturizer or laundry detergent, and it reminds Brigitte viscerally of getting shoved into dog guts out on the school field and she pretends to get something out of her bag, her textbook, a pencil sharpener, anything, just so she can surreptitiously move a little further away. When she re-emerges, Trina meets her eyes and says “What,” like Brigitte was staring or something.</p><p>“Let’s just do this,” Brigitte says. Someone at the other table hands her a stack of papers — the assignment sheet — and she takes two and passes it back. </p><p>“Fine,” Trina says, and then they both lapse into tense silence as they read it over, and get to work. It’s actually not awful. Trina knows what she’s doing and Brigitte isn’t met with stilted conversation. At least Trina knows who she is, knows that she’s not going to talk about much, and there’s a strange comfort in that. Somewhere at the back of the room, Tim’s voice rises above the others in something that sounds like a cracked operetta and the kids around him all burst into laughter. </p><p>“You guys want to keep it down?” The teacher asks, and Trina mutters “God, I am so glad I’m not back there.”</p><p>Brigitte glances back through her hair where one of the guys is pretending to hump his textbook. “Can’t imagine why,” she says, dryly, and Trina actually laughs. Barely. It’s a breath, and then she covers her smile with her hand and it’s gone. she doesn’t look at Brigitte once, and they don’t say anything else the whole class.</p><p>Most people aren’t done by the time the bell goes, which means it’s a weekend project. The teacher hands out another sheet to everyone, for extra credit and Brigitte thinks that he was really fucking prepared to not have to do anything today.</p><p>“Look, there’s gonna be no customers at the greenhouse on a Friday anyway, so let’s just get this over with,” Trina says, and then, “I’m not walking with you, I’ll meet you there,” and Brigitte, childishly, wants to say <em>I wasn’t waiting</em>, but she doesn’t. She just gathers her things and leaves.</p><p>~</p><p>She tells Sam that Trina’s coming, later, and Sam gives her this look like <em>What the fuck is going on?</em> but he just shrugs and asks her if she wants coffee. They drink it side by side behind the cash as the light starts to fade outside and when Trina comes, Sam makes his way towards the back saying “Call me if you need anything,” which means <em>call me if any creepers show up</em>, and Brigitte and Trina are left alone.</p><p>Trina’s easier at the greenhouse. Sometimes Brigitte thinks everyone is, and that the place just does that to people. They clear what they can from Sam’s office desk, and spread their work across the worn cedar and somehow it’s worse than class, without all those voices, all that noise around them, but Trina is all business, legs pulled up onto Sam’s computer chair, one drawn to her chest. Brigitte, too nervous to sit, thinks that Trina looks smaller, more real, like this. More like a person and less like someone Brigitte wishes had a toe tag in the morgue. Less like someone dangerous. She just looks like a girl. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she doesn’t have her hands wrapped around a field hockey stick.</p><p>They’re almost done the work when Trina says — slowly, like coming out of a dream — “Do you ever wonder what it’s all for? Like, we do all this work to impress teachers, or like, our parents, or the people reading our university applications. Trying to grow up…” She sets her pencil down. “But then you realize that adults are just going to fuck you over. But we’re still trying so  goddamn hard to impress them anyway.”</p><p>“I’m not,” Brigitte says, without looking up from the textbook, double-checking their answers — except she’s not reading anymore because she feels half-frozen, Trina talking to her like they suddenly all fucking civil. “Trying to grow up. I’m not gonna be like our parents.”</p><p>“You talk like she’s here,” Trina says, fixing impossibly blue eyes on her, and Brigitte feels trapped so she stays still. “God, you two have always been such freaks, but you’re not… the worst. I don’t know why you let her do whatever she wants you to.”</p><p>“I <em>don’t</em>,” Brigitte says, shoulders stiffening. </p><p>“Okay, sure” Trina says, in a way that means precisely the opposite.</p><p>“Who’s fucking you over?” Brigitte asks, keeping her voice as neutral as she can.</p><p>“Who isn’t?” Trina laughs, looking straight at her. “I was supposed to be coaching so I could get <em>out</em> of this stupid town but even Miz. Sykes fucked me over. You trust people, and they just… fucking… fuck you over. Sleep with the wrong person, once, and you're a slut forever.”</p><p>Brigitte starts gathering up papers, putting their project into order. “Maybe those people aren’t worth bothering with in the first place,” she says, thinking of the conversation she overheard in the library — Trina’s friends, calling her names, calling her psychotic. “They’re cretins anyway.”</p><p>“Yeah, you say that,” Trina says. “Because you think you’re so much better than everyone else. You and your sister.”</p><p>“I do not.”</p><p>“Oh, so that’s why you think it’s okay to make fucking jokes about me being <em>dead</em>?” Trina says, and her eyes are fiery, intense. <em>DOA at the hair dye aisle…</em> “What the fuck did I ever do to you?”</p><p>And Brigitte hears the reply in her head in Ginger’s voice, because maybe it is Ginger’s, but it’s hers, too: <em>Existed</em>. </p><p>But she doesn’t really have an honest answer to that. Trina was just Trina. Typically mean, typically beautiful. Brigitte drops her eyes and takes a breath that doesn’t do much to steady her. Because maybe Trina’s not wrong, maybe she, Brigitte, <em>does</em> think she’s better. Or she did. Because it occurs to her that they’re having a conversation, her and Trina Sinclair, unpleasant as it may be. And she almost doesn’t want to think about it, because she should be repulsed by the very fact that it’s happening at all, but she’s not. She’s... interested. Intrigued by the fact that Trina just might have some depth. She knows that it’s the ultimate betrayal. Her, Brigitte Fitzgerald, sitting in Sam’s greenhouse, and talking to Trina Sinclair. What would Ginger say, if she wasn’t already too busy playing Search and Destroy with Brigitte’s future? <em>You let her do whatever she wants to you.</em> But that hasn't been true, Brigitte thinks. Not lately. She wraps her arms around herself and looks back up. “What’s your point, Trina?”</p><p>Trina’s staring at her, looking half breathless, and then she throws her hands up, at a loss, leaning back in the chair. Her gaze flickers towards the back room where Sam is, somewhere, and she points towards the closed door. “He’s too old for you.”, she says, soft enough to not be overheard, and something hot spikes through Brigitte and she doesn’t know if it’s anger or shame, or just shock that maybe Trina sees more in her than she thought. </p><p>“You, too,” Brigitte retorts before she can even think. She takes a breath. “Anyway, it's” — she thinks she’s going to scream if she has to say it again, but she grinds it out anyway — “it’s not like that.”</p><p>“Oh, come <em>on</em>,” Trina says. “It’s so obvious—”</p><p>“Is that <em>all</em> you people think about?” Brigitte asks. “He’s just… we’re just friends.”</p><p>“No,” Trina says. “It’s not ‘friends’ for him.”</p><p>“What do you know?” Brigitte snaps.</p><p>“I know <em>him</em>.” </p><p>And Brigitte has nothing to say to that. She just unclenches her jaw and looks away. Trina, meanwhile, gets up. “Anyway, are we done?” She reaches for the papers Brigitte’s collected and puts them inside her text book, packing up. Without looking back she steps up to Sam’s door and knocks before pushing it open. “If it’s dark, do I get a ride home?” she asks him, and Brigitte watches her through her hair as Trina shifts her weight onto one hip, tosses her hair back over one shoulder, and Brigitte can’t see Sam from where she stands, but she can see, plain as day, that Trina knows exactly what she’s doing, how to do this — with guys, with people in general, and Brigitte just fucking doesn’t. And that’s never bothered her until right now.</p><p>
  <em>It’s not ‘friends’ for him.</em>
</p><p>She can’t even look at him when he steps out, but she doesn’t have any papers or anything to mess with because Trina packed them away. “Are you done?” Sam asks.</p><p>“Yeah,” Trina says, “we’re done.”</p><p>And Brigitte’s heart is beating so, so fast. So fast it almost hurts.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Regarding the HIV tests Sam takes in 1997/8 after performing oral sex on another man is not because it was a male/male encounter, but rather of the lack of condom which he just didn’t think to use at the time, because there was no risk of pregnancy. Stupid of him, since, clearly, pregnancy isn’t the only reason to wear condoms. </p><p>Only a couple years earlier, in 1995, the CDC had announced that AIDS had become the leading cause of death in people aged 25-44. Sam, at 22, knows that he falls very close to that category. He probably would have been able to test for HIV at 4 weeks, three months, and finally, if he wanted to be safe, six months, before he was officially cleared.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. spring</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>It’s because she’s been so goddamn lonely that she’s apparently just decided to spill her guts out to Brigitte Fitzgerald. She thinks this later — almost midnight, in her bedroom, alone and restless. She doesn’t run in the winter, and it makes her feel like she’s going to lose her mind, some days. Makes her feel like she’s just some kind of fragile girl-vessel for a live wire: dangerous and unpredictable. </p><p>She’s pacing its perimeter, made jagged by furniture, letting her fingertips brush over her desk, her dresser, her bed. Her room, she thinks, always feels surreal after seeing Sam. Sometimes she feels like she can’t quite place Sam in this world, or in her world. Maybe she can’t tell the difference between her world and the world at large — the world as it really is. In the beginning he just seemed movie-star cool — when she was young (she felt younger, then), and starstruck and stupid. Getting to know him, she realized he’s just another fucked up person, only his problems are so far out of her reach. His problems can’t be fixed by skipping class to get soft serve at Dairy Queen, or getting her ears pierced. His problems are out of his hands — they’re bills and chemical imbalances in the brain, or capitalism, and drinking too much. Sam, Trina thinks, sometimes, is a half-hearted death wish wrapped up in quiet hands and tired eyes. She told him that, once; called him out on his self-sabotage, his substance abuse. She didn’t know how to tell him it scared her, so she didn’t. She just told him he was an idiot for doing it. She wishes, now, that she’d said it different, said it gentler, but Trina has never known how to be gentle when she’s afraid.</p><p>And she’s starting to realize that her problems, too, aren’t small anymore. Not able to be fixed with ice cream, or by burning pictures of people she loved who betrayed her, or a hug from her mom, or the barely-there brush of another girl’s hand against her cheek as she does Trina’s eye shadow with careful strokes — heartbreak makeovers. She’s too old to be kissed better.</p><p>Growing up, Trina thinks, kind of sucks. </p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Winter tears its way out of Bailey Downs — a tantrum of squalling winds and torrential rain, and  the world didn’t end and computers didn’t blow up when their numbers ticked from 1999 to 2000, and everyone forgot about Y2K overnight, and suddenly it’s what the rest of the world calls spring. </p><p>Spring in Bailey Downs is lifeless, somehow — or at least that’s how Brigitte remembers it, year after year, as long as she can remember. It’s all beiges and pale greys, like a rental apartment. The strip malls and concrete buildings stand out starker against the palest blue sky, colouring everything ugly and damp — a heartbreak of a season, before everything crashes to green life in summer, buds and bees and blackflies all at once. </p><p>She wakes up on the first of April, and her eyes flicker to their countdown calendar, still frozen at 352 days until Out. She feels sort of sick, and so she stays under the covers and wonders how many days it really is, now, and tries to count it out roughly in her head, just for an excuse to not get out of bed. At least, she thinks, it’s Saturday, and estimates her count at around 132. 132 days. It squirms in her stomach. They will still, she thinks, have all summer. All summer to plan and maybe work — maybe at the greenhouse and maybe not — and then, conveniently, school will start again next September and she and Ginger can slip away under the cover of going to class and just… pass that county boarder. She knows it’s that easy, but somehow it doesn’t feel that easy and she doesn’t know if she’s just being logical, or if her unease is from her own anxious trepidation.</p><p>She thinks about Pamela, and then thinks <em>Don’t think about Pamela</em>, because lately… lately it’s sat with her wrong — heavy in her chest, thinking of Pamela suddenly all alone in this house, on this street, in this place. Even though Pamela fits in here, superficial suburban splendour, she’s… she’d be alone.</p><p>
  <em>Don’t think about Pamela.</em>
</p><p>Brigitte sits up and beside her, in her own bed, Ginger stirs. They lock eyes for a moment before Ginger burrows back into her pillow and Brigitte decides she might as well get up and get some water or something to see if that makes her feel better. She feels tired, despite the fact that she’s been sleeping, lately and there’s this twisting in her gut that makes her want to climb back into bed and curl up. She almost misses the dark stain on her sheets as she stands and draws the blankets back up in a half-hearted attempt at making the bed. She pushes them down again to investigate and dread swoops through her chest and stomach as she realizes that the edges of it are red red red, bleeding into the lilac purple of the sheets. </p><p>Blood, it’s blood. She pulls in a sharp breath and her fingers skim absurdly down her body as if to check for injuries, even though she knows what this is. She knows exactly what this is, only she can’t quite believe it. Her body betraying her, her womanhood, her femaleness clawing to the surface, clawing to get out. </p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>Ginger looks over again at the soft sound Brigitte makes, that little gasp. There’s blood on the long t-shirt she’s wearing, one of Henry’s from forever ago, almost like a dress on Brigitte. “Oh, Ginger says, realizing, “<em>Bee</em>,” and Brigitte turns to her, wide-eyed, fingers tense, like she has no idea what to do and Ginger’s frozen for a moment because for a half-second she feels exultant. <em>We’re the same again</em>, she thinks, but then she remembers that they’re supposed to hate this, this curse. She gets up fast, so fast her heart flutters in her chest and she stumbles slightly.</p><p>“Oh, fuck,” Brigitte says, like someone’s just told her she’s headed for the chopping block. She twists the hem of her shirt around to see the damage, the proof — connecting this crime to herself, her body. “Fuck,” she says, and she sounds so upset that Ginger wants to wrap her arms around her, but of course she doesn’t, because that’s celebration. That’s not what they always thought this should be — basically a scarlet letter A or maybe, Ginger thinks, with a touch of hilarity: <em>P.</em> </p><p><em>‘Count 28 days and mark your calendar with a P.’</em> Ginger shredded that leaflet and burnt it slowly from the tip of her cigarette, one afternoon when Brigitte was somewhere else. Brigitte always comes home smelling like leaves and loam and Ginger hates that more than she hates the smell of boys — all cologne and Irish Spring — soaps that reek of perfume stronger than any soap marketed towards women ever does.</p><p>Brigitte makes a b-line towards the bathroom and Ginger throws her covers over the stain, to hide the evidence, and follows her in. She doesn’t knock, just pushes the door open and starts going through the cabinets under the sink, searching for pads. Brigitte is sitting on the toilet near her right shoulder, legs bare, her underwear around her ankles.  Ginger knows how this goes, all that toilet paper coming up red, almost worse than wiping dog blood from around your mouth. Ginger emerges victorious, with the box in one hand and her hair in her face. She blows it away and slams the box onto the counter. Brigitte’s dropped her face into her hands, leaning over her legs. “Ginge…” she says, despairingly. </p><p>Ginger sighs and says, “It had to happen sometime,” and watches as Brigitte straightens and looks at the box, all sulk, and Ginger thinks maybe she’s never loved her more. “I’ll get you something to change,” she says. The toilet flushes as she goes out.</p><p>“I’m gonna shower,” Brigitte calls after her, but Ginger brings her a change of clothes anyway, sets them, folded, on the counter. They’re the clothes that, to her, are so, so Brigitte — all frayed edges and shapeless, but dark and soft, like, Ginger thinks, home. </p><p>“Don’t tell mom,” Brigitte says, and the word seems to ripple in the air around them, displacing them in time or space, rattling the identities that they’ve constructed and are constructing and will continue to create. Mom.</p><p>“I won’t,” Ginger says. “I’ll take care of those,” she says, indicating Brigitte’s bloody clothes and like it’s nothing, Brigitte starts the shower and then pulls off her shirt, pale and naked and shivering in the early morning chill. It’s like they’re suddenly one and the same again, like when they would take baths together, split inconveniently into these two rangy, imperfect girl-bodies that only serve, Ginger used to think, to separate them, until she discovered what other people could make her feel. What she could do, to her own body to see stars.</p><p>~</p><p>Ginger starts the washer, with Brigitte’s clothes and her bedsheets while she’s in the shower. For a moment she stares at them going around and around in the machine, and thinks about the night Brigitte did this for her — cleaned up all the blood and bile and how, together, they disposed of the purple liquid in the syringe. Later, upstairs at the kitchen island, Ginger scarfs down toast and coffee, and Brigitte huddles around her cup with her hair wet and this perpetual scowl and Ginger tells her her face will get stuck like that and Brigitte says “Good.”</p><p>It’s when she’s running water into the sink to wash their breakfast dishes — a habit Ginger’s picked up to save time on doing all the dishes at once in the evening — she looks back at Brigitte, all angles, tucked carefully against her body to avoid taking up too much space, to protect herself, and she feels her own chest clench and thinks I love you, but doesn’t say it. Instead she puts the last plate into the drying rack, shakes her hands dry, and says “Come on little sister. Let us smoke.”</p><p>~</p><p>“I think I’ll quit, actually,” Ginger says, the two of them ensconced in the playhouse in the yard, staring down at her cigarette. “I mean… it’s a waste of money if we’re on the run.”</p><p>Brigitte breathes a laugh, one corner of her mouth lifting. “We’re not on the run.”</p><p>“C’mon it’s more exciting that way.”</p><p>“Like <em>Unsolved Mysteries</em>,” Brigitte says, just as Ginger hums the first few notes of the theme song and they both laugh. They’re in sync again, Ginger thinks, and she’s a good sister. Suddenly she knows how to take care of Bee again, knows what to do — how to get blood out of sheets, how to make her forget about cramps, how to make her happy after biology turns her uterus traitor. </p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She’s still bleeding on Monday, but at least the cramps seem to have left, for now. And it feels strange, she thinks, to have this — to bleed like this — and nobody knows, or notices. It feels strange to be at Sam’s like — like he doesn’t know she’s different, and how could she tell him, anyway, even if she wanted to? How could she explain, precisely, <em>this</em>?</p><p>She almost forgets that blood makes her a target, though. Not the way it did in the locker room scene from <em>Carrie</em>, or in the way she feared it might, for any of the boys at school. In fact, it’s not really noticeable at all. But she forgot, maybe, about creatures that live on the fringes. And it was easy, easier than it should have been, maybe, now that the world looks different — wet, grey spring and dead grass and the smell of fallen leaves now the smell of whatever had frozen under the snow all winter, now warming and rotting and decaying to make way for new growth — it was easy to forget. Or maybe she just wanted to.</p><p>She’s walking home from the greenhouse, thinking about how it isn’t even quite dark yet, just this close, twilight gloaming. It’s faster to cut between houses than to follow the street all the way around, so she does, without thinking… when there’s this sound — one she knows — the soft swish of four paws over the earth, faster and faster and she whirls around in terror, already anticipating the hot rush of panting breath against her throat before those jagged teeth close down.</p><p>There’s this dark shape there, closer than she thought it would be, and it barks as she turns, the sound strangely hushed in the close evening air, promising still more rain and Brigitte gasps out “Fuck,” as her mind registers that this isn’t a lycanthrope, it’s not even a coyote, it’s—”</p><p>“He won’t hurt you,” Trina says, but she’s laughing. Like she thinks it’s hilarious that Brigitte was scared of her dog, huge for a puppy, but still a puppy. Brigitte wants to fucking throw up, but the relief is so strong that she almost has to sit down, there on the grass, to steady her heartbeat. Of course, Trina’s there, so she doesn’t; she just tries to steady her breathing, even as her heart tries to fling itself free of her ribcage.</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>This, Trina thinks, is hilarious, because Charley isn’t even that big yet, still falling all over his paws. He’s hardly vicious and Fitz, who feigns indifference to everything, finally drops her façade, the tension vibrating through her visibly, even from two yards away. </p><p>Her dog had slipped out of the yard when Brigitte passed by between houses, always curious about strangers, but shyer than Morely was. Still, Trina takes his collar and tugs him gently back. Brigitte Fitzgerald, Trina thinks, is scraggly and mistrustful as a feral cat, and as ungrateful as one, too. She gives Trina a defensive glare, always so sure she’s better than other people, than normal people. Trina hates it. She’d let Charley go bounce all over her, if she didn’t think he might get kicked.</p><p>“What,” Trina says, “You’re not scared of dogs, are you?”</p><p>“No,” Brigitte says, defensively, “I just thought…” she cuts off and then, as if to prove her point, extends one hand out to Charley, pale in the growing dark, and Trina unplants her heels from the ground to let him closer, still holding his collar so that he doesn’t jump up, and she watches as Brigitte lets Charley lick her fingers enthusiastically, whining with excitement, and wagging his whole body so hard. Dogs, Trina thinks, know good people, and she’s sort of pissed that he seems to like Brigitte so much already. </p><p>“Greenhouse?” Trina asks, both their eyes on the dog. It’s easier to talk that way.</p><p>Brigitte hums an affirmative, and then sets her messenger bag down on the ground so she can reach out with her other hand to pet him. She’s obviously not scared, now, so Trina says “I’m going to let him go,” and then she does it, and watches Brigitte step back beneath the weight of overexcited Rottweiler, but as soon as he’s loose, he settles a little, only leaping up once before he races off into her yard and comes back a moment later with a stick which he drops between them.</p><p>“Not now,” Trina tells him, “It’s too dark,” and she remembers again, what Sam had said.<em> It’s dark, it’s dark…</em> She looks up at Brigitte and catches her eyes too sharply. Brigitte looks away, just as it starts to rain, softly at first. “Was it an animal?” Trina asks, and Brigitte looks back. “What was it?”</p><p>Brigitte opens her mouth, and Trina thinks she might actually get an answer, but then the sky opens up. It’s cold rain, a deluge. The ground is turning to mud before either of them even moves. Trina indicates the overhang on her back porch, almost an inviation — almost — but she doesn’t look back as she calls Charley up the steps.</p><p>When she turns around, beneath the shelter, Brigitte’s followed her. Her house is two blocks away, and easy walk, even in the rain, but Trina’s started something, now, with her questions, and if she’s learning anything about Brigitte it’s that she doesn’t like to leave loose ends. Trina doesn’t even have to say anything, she just looks at her, both of them standing close to the side of her house under the overhang, illuminated only by the light coming through the window of Trina’s back door. The rest of her house is dark on this side.</p><p>Brigitte’s eyeing the night, but the rain is almost invisible in the darkness — just sound. </p><p>“Tell me,” Trina says.</p><p>“You wouldn’t believe me, even if I did,” Brigitte answers.</p><p>“It killed my dog,” Trina says, soft. “I think I deserve to know.”</p><p>Brigitte looks at her, Trina feels her eyes — her fingers stroking gently behind Charley’s ear where his fur is the softest, the way he leans into her leg where he sits. She knows what it feels like to be looked at, and when Brigitte looks up at her again, when their eyes meet, she knows, somehow, that they’re right at the edge of something. She almost tells her ‘never mind,’ almost goes back into her house.</p><p>Then Brigitte says, whisper quiet, some Greek or Latin word, and it means something, but Trina can’t grasp it. She can’t even recall exactly what it was, or maybe she just said it too softly to hear.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Brigitte swallows and does this thing — not quite an eyeroll, but it heats Trina’s blood anyway. “It was… like… an animal,” Brigitte tells her. “Like… a mutation. Like a wolf or a bear but— not altogether that. I don’t know, exactly, but it was big. It— I saw it in the woods, only for a second.”</p><p>“So how does Sam know?” Trina asks.</p><p>“I… he hit it, with his truck. By accident.”</p><p>Trina looks at her because it sounds like a ghost story, but it isn’t. It fucking isn’t, and somehow she knows that, and they’ve stepped over it now, this precipice, and they’re seeing each other as human, not just as girls, and she realizes, all at once, how fucked up that is, and she wonders where she learned that — that hatred, that drive to differentiate herself from girls she didn’t want to be, from girls that deviated in the wrong ways from what Trina was. Except now she doesn’t know who she is, she’s been trying to find it, and she looks at Brigitte now, in the dark, hair half-wet, and eyes strangely dark in the half-light and thinks that this strange creature whose frail body she knows she can push down — has pushed down, all violence and spite, onto the high school field — is just as human as she is, and she can’t hate her. She just can’t.</p><p>Trina looks away, and misses Morely — she misses him every goddamn day. And she misses Sam, too, but she’s missing something she didn’t really have. “So you two must have put the pieces together, huh? I wondered what the hell you two would’ve had in common.”</p><p>“It just happened that way,” Brigitte says, reluctant. But at least she’s not telling her they’re just friends anymore.</p><p>“I just don’t understand,” Trina tells her, looking back, “Why you just didn’t listen to me in the first place, when I told you he was a cherry hound.”</p><p>Brigitte furrows her brown and ducks her head, hiding behind that mess of hair. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself so tightly. “What do you care, anyway?” she asks.</p><p>Trina’s studying her, and Brigitte feels like she’s under a microscope so she does her best not to squirm while Trina pulls a strand of her curling hair through her fingers, drawing it straight, down past her collarbone, then lets it go. “I just,” she says, very softly “wish that some girl, somewhere, would realize they deserve better. Just once, and like— christ, you’re so goddamn smart and… full of yourself, jesus, if you don’t give a shit about everyone else as much as you say you don’t, then why’re you so willing to just give it up to a guy like him?”</p><p>“I’m not <em>giving it up</em>,”</p><p>“But you do like him. You do, and now you’re fucked, because you like him too much already.”</p><p>Brigitte doesn’t answer, so closed off that Trina <em>knows</em> she’s not getting any more out of her on this subject. She’ll talk about fucking mutant creatures in the night, but not about a boy. “Yeah,” Trina says, anyway, almost smug. “I know how it goes.”</p><p>“Maybe you don’t,” Brigitte says, and looks up, and there’s that defiance again, shaky and timorous, but there, and that’s how Trina knows she’s right, that Brigitte Fitzgerald, freakshow extraordinaire, is mundane enough to fall for some all-talk, beautiful guy, some asshole like Sam McDonald. Just like Trina did.</p><p>“Oh my god,” Trina says, half laughing. “I really do feel sorry for you.”</p><p>“Well, don’t.”</p><p>“I mean like…” Trina takes a breath, and feels her facade slipping, all that protective glamour just slipping away because this — she really wants to know this. “What’s it like? Just not giving a shit about what people think about you? What guys think? I bet it’s freeing.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She hears the shift in Trina’s voice, and that’s what lets her look up without every muscle in her body trying to make her curl even tighter, around herself. The rain is dripping off the roof above them in sheets and Brigitte’s caught between this sheltered place where she stands with her high school enemy, and walking home alone in the rain, and the dark — where she should be. </p><p>But should she? Should she always have to be alone when she’s not with Ginger? Should she always have to feel bad for the time she spends with anyone else, be it their mom, or Sam, or even Trina Sinclair. And Brigitte wonders if she will ever stop feeling like a traitor.</p><p>Trina isn’t looking at her, either, she’s staring at the rain where it hits the wooden deck, glittering when it catches the light, and Brigitte thinks about being brutally honest with her — thinks about telling her that all the caring that Trina has is, for Brigitte, all wrapped up in one person, in Ginger. All her life, she’s cared <em>so much</em>, tried so hard to be what Ginger wanted, what Ginger needed, tried so hard to be the sister Ginger loved, and it didn’t leave any room for anyone else. Not until lately.</p><p>“I’m not free,” she says, and imagines this white-hot brand burning the word over her heart, <em>traitor</em>, and says it anyway: “I want to be.”</p><p>Trina looks over, shakes some of her hair out of her face, and Brigitte realizes for the first time that she’s not wearing makeup like she does every day at school, and she looks young and reckless and sort of beautiful, Brigitte thinks, now that her face isn’t locked into that expression of hatred she gets on the field hockey pitch, that look of disgust she shoots at Brigitte across classrooms. It’s disarming.</p><p>Trina, without any malice, says “I hate that he likes you.”</p><p>“Well, I didn’t ask him to,” Brigitte says, and she feels the heat in her face. “I don’t even know if you’re right.”</p><p>“Please,” Trina says. “I’m always right,” and it’s almost funny, but Brigitte doesn’t want to laugh, in case Trina reads it wrong.</p><p>“Look, I don’t even know why I give a shit?” Trina continues, and she’s putting her armour back on in bits and pieces, these little shards that cut anyone who comes close but — Brigitte thinks — cut into Trina, too. Like sharp things do. “But sometimes it’s… intense. Like, it can feel like a lot, all at once. Like… things can build up, with him. If you have to just, like…” she furrows her brow and exhales this frustrated breath “I could’ve used someone to talk to, that’s all,” she finishes. “So. If you needed… whatever.” She gestures vaguely to herself, like<em> I’m here</em>.</p><p>And Brigitte’s floored. She has no idea what to say, or even how to process that, so she just stands there, probably gaping like a fish.</p><p>“Like I said, I don’t even know why I care. I still totally hate you,” Trina finishes and that, somehow, lets Brigitte breathe because Trina’s looking at her like she doesn’t. And part of her knows that she should read this like a prank, a trick, or she’s stupid enough to get what’s coming to her, but at her core, somewhere in the centre of her, she knows it isn’t. </p><p>“You know, you could just stand back and wash this crash and burn,” Brigitte says.</p><p>Trina lets out a little huff of laughter. “The worst part is, I don’t want it to. I… really cared about him,” she says, almost laughing the words, but it tightens something in her chest, and Brigitte can hear it. “He’s all closed off, but then <em>you</em> walk into the greenhouse and it’s like fucking Christmas.” She looks up towards the rain, the dark night sky and takes a breath. “I dunno, maybe he deserves something like that. But we deserve better, too. It’s all fucked up. He’s fucked up. He smokes too much. It’s self-destructive. And I fucking hate,” she laughs it out like she can’t believe she’s saying it. “I fucking hate that we’re the ones who try so hard to fix it.”</p><p><em>We are.</em> Her and Brigitte. Maybe just women in general. It feels bigger than just the two of them. “Maybe you can’t fix anyone, ever,” Brigitte says. “Maybe they have to be ready. Fix themselves”</p><p>“That’s chaos,” Trina tells her. “How’s anyone supposed to exist with other people if we’re all just so fucked up? It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s supposed to get easier, isn’t it?”</p><p>“I dunno. I feel like it’s only gotten harder.”</p><p>“Right?” Trina says. “God, nobody ever fucking admits that.”</p><p>“Maybe you just need better friends.”</p><p>“Or like, any friends.”</p><p>They both go quiet as the rain lets up, like heavy rain always does — too soon. Brigitte reaches out once more to the dog, touches the soft fur on its throat, and then steps out into the drizzle to go home without a world.</p><p>“Hey,” Trina calls after her. “Sam’s truck was messed up before Morely disappeared.”</p><p><em>Fuck</em> she thinks, and turns back to Trina, dressed for bed in sweat pants and a hoodie, untied tennis shoes to take the dog out. A real fucking person, all at once, as real and raw as Ginger is, as Brigitte herself sometimes feels. Different from what Brigitte always thought she was; smarter, softer… “I know,” Brigitte answers.</p><p>“So… there’s more than one.” — it’s half a question.</p><p>“There was,” Brigitte tells her. “I stopped it.” She takes a breath. “I’m really sorry about your dog, Trina.”</p><p>“Me too,” Trina answers, honest, but hard as stone.</p><p>And it seems like there’s nothing left to say, so Brigitte turns and heads for home.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She doesn’t say anything to Ginger or to Sam about standing under the eaves with Trina. It’s weird, Brigitte thinks, to have her name in her head without the twinge of hatred that used to spark through her ribs. She tries very hard not to think about Sam, but it doesn’t work very well. A week of greenhouse shifts passes where Brigitte tries very hard not to think about it because, she thinks, even if Trina’s right, and Sam does… does like her, it doesn’t mean that she… feels anything. </p><p>Except…</p><p>There’s the impossible comfort of this place — the way time seems to make sense here, the way hours past, liquid soft, the way she feels herself settle in ways she doesn’t or can’t anywhere else. And that’s how she finds herself in his room in the back, where she’s meant to be getting her things so that he can take her home. The TV is still on, from where they ate a hurried early supper before getting to work creating new flower beds, and there’s still soil caked beneath her fingernails. She reaches to shut it off but then doesn’t. Instead, she flips the dial through channels until the familiar <em>Unsolved Mysteries</em> theme interrupts the mixup of so many different people talking across so many different channels, and maybe she knows what she’s doing when she straightens up to watch it. When she doesn’t go back out to where he’s waiting.</p><p>Eventually he comes to find her, laughing softly from the doorway, and she half turns back to him. He smiles at her. <em>Like Christmas</em>, Trina had said, and he asks her: “Did you get lost?”</p><p>“I haven’t seen this one,” Brigitte tells him, indicating the show and Sam glances at it, then at the stove clock which reads 9:00 p.m.</p><p>“Wanna stay?”</p><p>“Can I?”</p><p>“Sure, always.”</p><p>Sometimes, Brigitte thinks, Sam sparks something against her bones that fans out across her ribcage like wildfire, and all she can do it let it burn out. She wonders what would happen if it didn’t. They settle themselves into their usual places on the couch, Brigitte curled into the corner, sometimes with the blanket and Sam at the other hand, occasionally shifting to roll a joint over the coffee table, or roll it into the ashtray, and Brigitte has no interest in the effects of drugs, but she likes the heavy smell of it, the way it’s so familiar, the way it reminds her of him, and here, and safe.</p><p>At some point he gets up to do the dishes — some of the cases he doesn’t care to watch, says there’s enough terrible shit close to home, that he doesn't need any more of it in his head. Brigitte has always liked the paranormal ones — the impossibly strange — better than the rest. She likes trying to understand the unexplainable. She pulls the blanket down from the back of the couch and curls into a ball at her end because maybe he won’t ask her if she wants to stay, maybe he’ll just let her, and this can become something that’s theirs, understood between them.</p><p>The show ends, and he comes back to muted commercials. She’s hardly taking up any more space on the couch than she was, but he sits on the floor next to her and rolls another joint that he doesn’t light.</p><p>“Can you show me how to do that?” Brigitte asks him. “I want to roll my own cigarettes,” and he does, tearing the thin paper away from the joint and re-roling it in a new one so she can watch. </p><p>“You know, it’s just as bad for you,” Sam tells her.</p><p>“...I’m thinking of quitting, anyway,” she says. Ginger's words.</p><p>He sets the joint down on the table to be smoked later, and meets her eyes. “Should probably stay away from me then,” he tells her, only half-joking.</p><p>“Rather not.”</p><p>He looks at her for a moment too long before he drops his gaze. The TV flashes over them, some obnoxious commercial colouring the room yellow, then blue, then yellow again, far too fast. Sam reaches for the remote and shuts it off, and then it’s night dark. He fumbles around on the table, lights the black pillar candle and leans back against the couch. She can’t see his face from her angle and she braces herself on one forearm to sit up again, make room. Before she can get far, though, his fingers slide, cool, over her wrist and she goes still. “Jesus, that really is some scar,” he says, about the knife-cut she made in the greenhouse, her last-ditch effort to get Ginger to trust. It’s still raised — a white line across her palm.</p><p>She shrugs her free shoulder, lets him touch her. </p><p>“Do you ever wish it went different?”</p><p>“Not anymore,” she says, “I don’t think,” and she watches Sam turn her hand over, palm up, feels this skip in her chest as he slides his thumb over the healed skin, over her fingers, spreading her hand like a palm-reader. He turns her skull ring so it’s straight, almost absently. She lets him.</p><p>“You know those lines you sometimes see in pumpkins and tomatoes,” he says “the places where they’re brown and the flesh has dried out — those are usually places where the flower’s been damaged, before it ever produced fruit. Sometimes crushed against the plant’s stem or maybe half-eaten by chipmunks or garden snails, or birds or something. Anything, really. That damage in the flower turns into those scars. People… supermarkets usually just throw those away, because everyone thinks it’s a defect but it’s really a… just like with people, it shows that they overcame something. It makes them stronger.”</p><p>Maybe Brigitte thought liking someone would feel different — all desperate and clinging and saccharine — but if this is what it feels like, if this is what this is — this moth-beat of her heart against her chest, this line she finds in the dark that always, eventually, brings her to his door, where all the noise softens, for a little while… she wants it. She can admit that, at least. “We’re all just worried about… aethetics I guess,” Brigitte says, and Sam murmurs this soft affirmative. He lets her go, and Brigitte screws up all her courage and says “Come up,” and it’s almost not a question.</p><p>He moves, and the candle flame flickers. He takes his place on the other end of the couch, but Brigitte says “I meant...,” softly, but doesn't finish. Can't. She just shifts back, makes a place for him beside her. She feels like she can’t even breathe anymore, and it looks like he can’t either. His eyes always look so dark in half-light, his mouth softly open. She holds his eyes, and she doesn’t know if it’s a plea or a challenge or just… waiting. But then he comes, carefully, carefully lies down next to her, and the couch is big enough to leave an inch, maybe, of space between them, and he leaves all of it. She can barely bring herself to look at him, so she fixes the blanket, pulls it over him, too. His arm is cold, bare under his t-shirt, when she brushes her hand accidentally against it. As cold as his fingers were against her wrist.</p><p>“You just,” he whispers, “want me to shut up about plants,” and she laughs, startled into it. It’s the only way anyone can really get her to laugh for real. Anyone besides Ginger. And he smiles at her, but there’s this question in his eyes she doesn’t know how to answer. She’d kind of hoped he would know where to go from here, but maybe this — two people, trying to be just that, trying to be two people — maybe no one ever knows exactly what to do. Maybe everyone’s just trying their best not to hurt or get hurt; trying to do right by the other.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>He isn’t entirely sure what this is, but he isn’t entirely surprised by it, either. Like maybe they’ve been building to this, pretending all the time like they weren’t. Still, he’s closer to her than, maybe, he’s ever been, and it was her idea, and for a moment he had her gaze, he had the edge of one of her rare smiles, but she’s looked away again. Tentative, he touches her hair, just the ends of it where it’s all wild split-ends, the suggestion of a curl. She looks up at him again, just a flicker of a connection and says “I told Trina about the lycanthrope.”</p><p><em>Oh.</em> “Did she believe you?”</p><p>“Kind of. I mean I kind of told.” She’s telling him like a confession — this thing that had been so secret between them: lycanthropes and silver bullets, purple flowers and biology — told to <em>Trina</em>, of all people. </p><p>“She probably would have figured it out on her own, eventually,” Sam says.</p><p>“I didn’t tell her about Ginger. But I told her about what happened to your truck.”</p><p>“Okay,” Sam says. Because what happened to Ginger will always be Ginger’s to tell, not theirs.</p><p>“Okay,” she echoes, and they’re back on the same page. Just like that. But he knows that it’s not always that easy. It wasn’t that easy when she cut her hand open, and infected herself with Ginger’s blood. It was like he wasn’t even there, then. He feels like Ginger, maybe, is just one more thing that stands between them, and suddenly he has his own confession — one that has hardly seemed pertinent until now.</p><p>
  <em>I know you want to, everybody does … what would I be like, huh? What would I do? What would I feel like, inside?</em>
</p><p>He could just not tell her, he reasons. Because this, right now, feels like a chance, like something he might not get again — Brigitte Fitzgerald, letting anyone so close. It reads like a fairy tale, Sam thinks, and he doesn’t know exactly how he ended up in it. He pushes her hair back and she lets him, lets him touch his knuckles to the place her jaw curves upwards, just beneath her ear. He could just… he could tell her after — after this, whatever this moment is, whatever it turns into. He could be honest, just — later…</p><p>Only he can’t. He can’t do that to her, and he doesn’t want to.</p><p>“Brigitte, I… not to be um, presumptuous, but, you should know, maybe you already know— jesus, okay…” Deep breath. “On Halloween, before you came to the party… Ginger—” Brigitte looks up, but Sam can’t look at her to read her expression. He pulls his fingers out of her hair and something in him fucking aches. “She kissed me, or maybe she didn’t, and it was all just… transformation, but she did, and I let her…” His heart is beating out this rhythm that feels like a countdown to a bomb going off, to the end times. “I let her, so…”</p><p>Radio silence from Brigitte. It’s like it’s screaming in Sam’s ears. “It was— I fucked up,” he finishes. “But that’s it. That’s all. Obviously.” He hadn’t been infected so… or maybe it wasn’t obvious.</p><p>“Okay,” Brigitte says, and he can’t quite read the tone of her voice.</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>It’s not like she hadn’t assumed something like that. That Ginger would, back then — she’d been doing it to everyone else, after all. But Brigitte knows, too, that it’s not about Sam, it’s about her. It’s always been about her and Ginger. </p><p>“Okay,” she says again, and she can feel the tension in him, the way he’s holding himself. Still, he looks at her, when she looks up, and she wonders if she will ever be able to explain to Sam how it is between them, between sisters. How, for Ginger, it was never about Ginger’s jealousy of Brigitte, but about her jealousy of Sam — of Sam’s chances, with her sister. How it was always about the two of them, and boys only came between.</p><p>“I guess I knew, already,” she says, softly. “But she… it wasn’t her. Or maybe it was, I dunno.” Brigitte shuts her eyes and whispers the rest through the dark. “I don’t think I care.”</p><p>“I care,” Sam says, and she can’t look at him. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it.”</p><p>“Maybe it had to go that way,” Brigitte says. “Anyway, we aren’t anything. We weren’t back then. You can do what you want.”</p><p>“Do you want to be?” Sam asks, "Something?" And it’s so soft. She can feel his breath against her mouth and her stomach twists. She keeps her eyes closed, and then his fingers are against her cheek, in her hair, feather-touches and she’s trying to think — about what that even means, but all she can hear is the persistent beat beat beat of her heart, not slowing down. Not anywhere near it. </p><p>Finally she just decides on honesty, and says “I don’t know…”</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>She says it so thoughtfully, and he’s so tense he’s shaking. He wonders if she can feel it, and he thinks that maybe he’s never wanted anything as much as he wants to close this distance between them — not because he’s lonely, not because he’s touch-starved, not even because he’s thought about her when he shouldn’t have — when he’s left to the silence and solitude of the greenhouse and the memory of her hands and her mouth and the impossible green of her eyes, and his own treacherous thoughts coming back, again and again, to<em> what if—</em> it’s not really because of any of that, not in this moment. It’s because it’s <em>Brigitte</em>.</p><p>Brigitte, who stepped into his life half a year ago and shook him to the core, and not just because there were wolves at her heels. She’s the only person he always wants to see, his partner in all things strange and morbid and impossible, his intellectual equal, his closest friend. She sees the world in colours he doesn’t, she listens, she feels… like shelter. Like home.  But she’s not sure about this and he sure as hell isn’t, either, and for all of those reasons, he draws away from her a little more and says “This probably isn’t a great idea…” He thinks maybe if they had some distance they could do this better, do this right. Like maybe if he went and stood in the kitchen or something, far away from her, then he’d feel like they could talk about this without him being an idiot and fucking everything up, the way he did with Trina, a hundred times over. </p><p>Brigitte kind of whispers this “Um,” and that doesn’t help. “I never said you had to,” she says, but she’s getting it wrong.</p><p>“No,” he says, and looks at her. Christ she’s so close, but she’s not looking at him. “Just— maybe we should think.” And that gets her eyes on his. She looks up at him like he’s lost his mind, fierce as hell, and he feels a little like he’s backed her into a corner.</p><p>She says “I feel like I <em>have</em> been thinking about this... Haven’t you?”</p><p>“<em>Have</em> you?” he asks. And he’s startled, genuinely, that she might have been. That all this isn’t just him staring down the barrel of self-destruction yet again, dragging her down with him.</p><p>“I asked you first,” she says.</p><p>He breathes a laugh he doesn’t really feel and says “Last winter… the first night you stayed over, here. I think we were outside, sharing a cigarette.” He says it like he isn’t sure. Like he doesn’t know exactly where they were when he realized he was in love with her. “Probably been thinking about it since then.”</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Brigitte swallows and then says “You could’a said,” but then thinks that maybe that’s not very fair. After all, she couldn’t actually admit any of this to herself until Trina laid it out on the table. Or rather, Brigitte's known it forever, maybe as long as Sam has — longer — but she couldn't articulate it, couldn't bear to. Because it's not that Trina put the idea into her head, it's more like she flipped the last few pieces of the puzzle over — revealing their colours — while Brigitte had just been staring at the cardboard backs of them, wondering why it was so impossible to make them fit. Like maybe she'd been trying to fit pieces of herself where they didn't go forever. Until she wasn't.</p><p>“With Trina,” Sam’s saying, “I…”</p><p>The pause stretches out and out until it becomes clear he doesn’t know how to continue, so she finally breaks it. “…I’m not Trina.”</p><p>“…I don’t want to fuck this up,” Sam whispers, and she feels him draw away as he sits up. For a moment, he hesitates. For a moment, he’s still there with her, but then he stands, and she loses the weight of his body so close to hers, the warmth of it. He circles the coffee table, and the candle flickers between them.</p><p>She sits up, feeling surreal — like how were they so close, and now suddenly, they’re not? How does anyone get that back? “How do you even know you will?” she asks.</p><p>“Well. Historically, I’m pretty good at it.”</p><p>Brigitte feels tension shoot down her spine. It tightens her shoulders. She sighs as she cuts her eyes away, and she has a hundred things she wants to say but none of them are right. She’s not even sure how many of them are genuinely hers, or if they’re Ginger’s, or Trina’s, or Pam’s. “Okay,” she says, after a moment, because that’s the most genuine thing she can manage, and untangles herself from the blanket before she reaches for her bag on the floor.</p><p>Sam, too soft, almost wounded, says “Where are you going?” and she realizes, suddenly, that he thought that she would leave, now. In the middle of this. She pulls out a cigarette, slightly crumpled, from the side pocket of her bag and says “Nowhere.”</p><p>That seems to catch him off guard, and a for a moment they just look at each other, and then she drops her eyes, sets about straightening the cigarette as best she can.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>“Brigitte,” he starts, but doesn’t know how to continue. He isn’t good at being honest, not like this. He’s got this face he presents to the world: this untouchable, invulnerable person. Even with her, even now. He wants to fucking tear it down so he says the thing that scares him the most. “I really just… I don’t want you to disappear.” From the greenhouse, from his life… he means <em>I don’t know if I can lose you</em>, but that rings with cliché, even if it’s true. He’s trying, though, he’s fucking trying.</p><p>“Let’s just… we’re still friends right? Whatever happens?” she says, and he thinks maybe that’s the first time they’ve said it, admitted it to each other. He’s said it what feels like a hundred times to Trina, and to himself — chastising himself for feeling anything beyond that — but never to her. Never out loud. But he honestly doesn’t know the answer. More than anything, he wants it to be <em>yes</em>. But she isn’t after divining the future, she isn’t even after his answer right now, she has enough trust in what’s between them in this moment to accept his silence. He watches her lean forward and light her cigarette from the candle flame and something in him settles and tightens all at once. He’s certain that he’s never loved anyone more, and that he never will. After a second he comes back around the table to her and sits at her side, closer than before, but not as close as he wishes he were. She hands him the cigarette, silently, and he takes it from her, and they don’t speak, handing it back and forth until it’s finished, and she butts it out in the ashtray.</p><p>He wishes he had something to say, wishes he could offer her something better than this, but in the end he just pushes a hand through his own hair in frustration, and then leans into her arm. He drops his forehead gently against her shoulder, just for a moment. She makes this minuscule movement like flinching, and takes a breath that hitches somewhere — that tangles in her chest — so he draws back at the same time as she turns into him.</p><p>Brigitte kisses him. After a beat of her dark, candlelit eyes on his, she kisses him, quick and tentative and sort of wrong. He inhales fast against her mouth, startled, and then has to stop her before she can pull away from him. He catches her by the shoulders and then kisses her back better, harder, even as he half lets her go, neither of them sure whether they should pull close or push away.</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>It’s sort of awkward. She freezes up more than once, but she’s got this fistful of his shirt near his collar that she twists to stop him pulling away when he tries to. She doesn’t know how to do this. She’s never kissed anyone and that, she’s certain, is painfully obvious to him. Her teeth click against his — she’s fairly sure that’s not supposed to happen — and she’s just about to give up trying entirely when he laughs softly against her mouth and pulls away, just a little; until he’s got her face in both hands, gentle. “Okay,” he breathes, and holds her eyes for a second. It helps that he looks almost as overwhelmed as she feels — pupils blow dark and wide, eyes searching. He kisses her again, softly, then pulls back, even as he gathers up a careful handful of her hair. Kisses her again, and she’s starting to get it. Maybe. When he kisses her a third time she kisses him back and feels the whole pulse-beat of her body shift, spread out hotly through her until she’s warm with it.</p><p>Later — she's not sure how much later, because time and space has lost its meaning, there's just her and Sam and the way the candlelight flickers behind her closed eyelids — they lie down together again, closer this time, both of them huddled under the blanket because it's cold at night, even in spring. It’s mostly quiet, but they talk a little, just whispered fragments of conversation. In one of the wondering silences, she kisses him again, because she can, and he sighs against her mouth and she thinks she knows how that feels. She thinks she knows <em>exactly</em> how that feels. He only pulls away to blow out the candle, but then he's back, finding her again in the darkness. He runs his hand over her hair, her shoulder, her arm. He twists her rings the right way around on her fingers and somewhere along the way they sleep. That’s as far as it goes, somehow. Even though she’d been told it would be different. </p><p>She’s beginning to realize that, sometimes, you can really only discover how things are for yourself.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>Her bed dips and she rolls over into Brigitte, whose hair and skin are cold and damp. She smells like rain. </p><p>“Ugh,” Ginger says, but lets Brigitte burrow into her for warmth anyway. She twists to squint at the digital clock — it’s past ten, Saturday morning. “Did you just get home?”</p><p>“Yeah.” She says it, and there’s this weight to it that maybe only Ginger can hear. They get their arms around each other, and Brigitte shivers against the heat of Ginger’s body, like she hadn’t felt the cold until now. Their eyes meet and Ginger knows. Before she even asks, she knows, and it sinks like a stone through her chest. She blinks and then says, so soft it’s almost toneless. “I fucking knew you were into him.”</p><p>Bee doesn’t say anything, just searches her eyes, and Ginger’s certain they used to be able to read one another better. “So,” she says, “Aren’t you going to tell me?” And as much as it hurts — and it does hurt — she wants to know. She want to be the first person Brigitte comes to — she wants to be her best friend, her closest confidant, always. She wants to be her older sister, only better than before. </p><p>Brigitte can’t seem to speak, so Ginger asks. “Did you kiss him?”</p><p>“...Yeah.”</p><p>“Did you fuck him?”</p><p>“<em>No</em>.”</p><p>And then Brigitte tells her what happened the night before, piece by piece. Tells it like shame, like a confessional. “This morning he said we could be whatever I wanted...”</p><p>“What do you want?”</p><p>“I dunno,” Brigitte says, and exhales like it hurts. “I want him to care.”</p><p>“I think he does already, Bee.”</p><p>Inhale, her voice tighter. “I don’t know how to feel this.”</p><p>And something in Ginger seems to splinter, sharp and painful. Like slamming your fingers in a door, blindingly bright. She started this, she thinks. Made it so that Brigitte doesn’t know how to be close to anyone but her. And half of her still wants it, craves it. Half of her, still, wishes that they’d shared the curse and just kept running, instead of coming back here, to this room. She finds the hem of Brigitte’s sweater and slides her hand up to press against the warm, thin skin of her chest where her heart beats and beats like a caged bird. She can feel her breathing, the hitch in it, she can feel the softness of the edge of her left breast where Ginger’s ring and smallest finger press down — not to hurt, just to feel. </p><p>“I dunno, Bee” Ginger says, “Seems to me like you do,” and Brigitte holds her eyes, looks fucking <em>into</em> her, and Ginger lets her. “D’you— you love him, don’t you?”</p><p>“I dunno,” Brigitte says, again, voice achingly tight.</p><p>“You like him, though. A lot.” It's not a question anymore.</p><p>And Brigitte blinks back tears — old scars, the kind you can’t see, but inflicted by Ginger all the same, and all these other people in her life Brigitte was supposed to be able to trust. Brigitte nods, and her jaw goes tight and Ginger wants to kiss her but knows that she can’t. Of course, she can’t. “I’m sorry,” Bee tells her. “Ginge…”</p><p>“Fuck off,” Ginger says, and it comes out far too gentle. She slides her hand away from Brigitte’s heart and wraps her arm around her back, pulls her close. “Don’t be sorry,” she whispers into her ear, and presses her lips to her temple, her cheekbone. “Don’t be sorry.”</p><p>She thinks <em>I should be sorry</em>, and she <em>is</em>, but she isn’t, too. She wants to be, and that, for now, will have to suffice. “I mean,” she says, later, when they’re breathing even, when their hearts are settled into something gentle, in that safe place in each other’s arms, “I guess you could do worse.” And it's as close to a blessing as she knows how to give.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>He should have expected her to show up here, and she does while school is still in, on Monday afternoon. At least, he thinks, there's no customers and he’s here alone.</p><p>She slams into the greenhouse in this blur of purple and red, targets him like he’s the only red thing in the bull ring and stalks over and Sam half wonders if he should keep hold of the little cultivating fork he’s holding to turn the earth in the raised beds, just in case he needs to defend himself, and almost laughs at the thought. Might laugh if Ginger didn’t have the perpetual aura of an ominous stormcloud. </p><p>She stops short in front of him, her face set in dislike, and he watches her eyes fall to the pink flowers of the seedlings at his side that will, if she doesn’t murder him, be transferred to the planter. She says “If you ever do anything to hurt her I will tear your tongue out of your face with my bare hands.”</p><p>Sam doesn’t think she’s lying even a little bit. “I mean,” he says, “I'm aiming not to. Even without the threat of violence.”</p><p>“Can’t predict the future though,” she says.</p><p>“No, you’re right.”</p><p>“I don’t even know why she likes you,” Ginger snarks and Sam sighs and sets down the gardening tool and wraps his fingers around the rough stone edges of the planter. He presses his tongue to his lower teeth and can’t look up at her, because fucked if he knows why either. </p><p>“I’d never hurt her on purpose,” Sam says, and meets her eyes. “She— I wouldn’t.”</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>She stares at him and thinks that maybe that’s the best any of them can do. She never meant to hurt Brigitte either, but she remembers the feeling of Brigitte’s breath shaking in her lungs beneath Ginger’s palm the morning she came home from his place, the way Brigitte thought it was a betrayal somehow. The way Ginger still half thinks that it is, that it might be, but… she thinks that she wants Brigitte to be able to have <em>something</em> — something that isn’t all wrapped up in Ginger herself, because fuck, Ginger needs it, too. Something that isn’t wholly consumed by what she feels for Brigitte, isn’t fueled by it, until everything she touches is incendiary. And maybe that’s growing up, maybe that’s what it really feels like to love someone the right way. Wanting them to have something that makes them happy, even when it doesn’t involve you. Or maybe it isn’t. Ginger still has no idea, she just knows that what they had before wasn’t working. That it was corrosive.</p><p>She crosses her arms, shifts her weight onto one hip. “You told her,” she says, “about Halloween.”</p><p>“Felt right,” Sam says, suddenly on edge — more like she hoped he’d be when she slammed her way inside. </p><p>“It was never about you,” Ginger says. And maybe she shouldn’t say it, but she does and Sam meets her eyes. He nods.</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“She was mine first,” Ginger says, very softly and Sam takes a shallow breath.</p><p>“I think she’s her own, first,” he tells her.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>Her face changes. For a moment she looks young and unsteady but more than all of that, she looks sad. He knew, ages ago, that this was bigger than just sisters, that it was much more tangled and intricate than that, worlds more complex. Thing is, he accepted it a long time ago, too. And it doesn’t change who Brigitte is. He never meant to get involved but he has, now; he is, and it’s just… that’s it.</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>“I think she’s her own first, but I know what you’re saying,” Sam amends and Ginger looks up, and something passes between them. Maybe it’s not understanding, that would be too easy, but she knows he does get it, at least. She knows he’s not pretending that all of this is going to be straightforward, or that any of it is going to be simple. Probably, Ginger thinks, for her, none of it will be painless, but she was hurting anyway. They both were, her and Bee. </p><p>And the way he says it, that Bee’s her own... He’s not going to take Brigitte from her. He can’t. But it means Ginger can’t, either. She can’t have all of her anymore. But maybe it has to be that way. More than anything, Ginger wants things to be different. She wants it to be better, between her and Bee.</p><p>“Good,” she says, and she steels herself once again before she turns around and walks out of the greenhouse and into the full light of the sun.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>fin</p><p>The next chapter will be an epilogue, and not as long. Guys, thank you so much for sticking with this accidentally 70k long fic. Thank you.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. get back together in your heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>We can be something if you want…</em>
</p><p>Sam thinks, all weekend, (where Brigitte is mysteriously absent) that he shouldn’t have said that. He should be — he should be fucking <em>thinking</em> about this and not just letting his heart run his mouth off, jesus christ. But he only thinks it after she leaves, Saturday morning. After she’s not curled into him on the couch, fast asleep, when she’s not standing in his kitchen early in the morning, wrinkled clothes and wild hair, holding a cup of coffee and looking at him with those eyes that look like they’ve seen a century of hardship, <em>oh, christ.</em></p><p>He can’t— he <em>can’t</em> fuck up here, the way he did with Trina. He can’t fuck up another girl. When he told her <em>We can be whatever you want</em>, he meant it, but Trina’s words from forever ago ring through his head all that solitary weekend: <em>if you do anything to her</em>. Unsaid: <em>if you do anything to her that you did to me. </em></p><p>And he thinks maybe he should call this off. Maybe that’s what’s right. Maybe he doesn’t know how to love anyone — hasn’t everyone always left him, after all? Maybe that’s just his lot in life. Maybe…</p><p>Maybe he needs to talk to someone. Get out of his head.</p><p>Ginger shows up on Monday afternoon to tell him that she’s ready and willing to disfigure him if Brigitte gets hurt because of him, and he thinks it holds more impact when she’s just a girl — sixteen and breathless, feeling everything so much she’s almost burned by her own fucking flames — than when she was half-wild, half-wolfen, her inhuman fingernails tearing little fissures into the pages of his skin mags. </p><p>And Brigitte doesn’t show up. Not Monday after school or Tuesday either, and he wonders if maybe <em>he’s</em> supposed to. Show up for her, where she is. She’s always the one that finds him, after all; maybe she’s waiting for him to do the same. But then again, he thinks, Brigitte doesn’t operate like that. She’s hardly precious about her feelings. She shows up when she wants to see him, or when she needs something. She doesn’t expect him, or anyone, to just read her mind. If she hasn’t shown, it’s because she doesn’t want to. Right? Maybe she’s second-guessing everything. But even if she were, she’d tell him, right? Or she’d at least come. She said they were friends, after all. That whatever happened, they’d still be friends. Maybe, Sam thinks, it’s better that way.</p><p>By Wednesday, though — and this is a dark thought he has in the middle of the night — he wonders if something’s happened to her. He gets fucked up about it, too because — well, who’d fucking tell him, if something did? He doubts Ginger would bother. Doubts she’d even think to. He doesn’t fucking sleep after that, not really. The next day he talks himself out of swinging by the school. He’s meant to be working, anyway: prepping local company gardens for planting. It’s not a very good excuse, but it works. He takes the long way back to the greenhouse, avoids Bailey Downs High School altogether, and he thinks about his notepad sitting by the phone back home where, if he flips back a few pages, her name and number are written.</p><p>No one, he reminds himself, will be home at this time of day, anyway, so leaves it alone for now. He waits for her to show after school, and she doesn’t. He reminds himself that this has happened before, last Halloween, when he said <em>Try to come tonight</em>, and she said she would, and then she didn’t. Couldn’t. All of that turned out okay. All of it turned out okay, but she was still in trouble. She still needed him for something — the cure, the dosage. And he can’t get rid of this pit in his stomach.</p><p>He thinks <em>who would know if she’s okay?</em> and then doesn’t know why he hasn’t thought about it before.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>TRINA</strong>
</p><p>It’s still cold enough in the mornings to see her breath when she goes running, and she keeps her hands tucked inside the sleeves of her jacket, but the rest of her is warm. Charley lopes at her side. This early in the morning, it’s usually just the two of them on the community trails, sometimes she even sees rabbits and, once, a deer — sometimes someone will whiz by, biking to work, the sound of their bell breaking through the music playing on her discman.</p><p>She comes around a long corner and becomes wary automatically, but she quickly recognizes the figure standing by the park bench. She slows down when she reaches him, pulling her headphones down around her neck. Her music sounds tinny and strange amidst the morning quiet.</p><p>“Hi,” she says, and shuts it off.</p><p>“Hey,” Sam says, and exhales smoke towards the ground. </p><p>She shifts, her blood still pumping hard. She brushes a stray hair back into her ponytail where it doesn’t stay. She stays quiet, waiting on him. Sam isn’t the type to go for a morning walk, but he knows she runs here. She knows he’s here for her, but she doesn’t really have to make it easy for him.</p><p>He finishes his cigarette quickly, tosses it away.</p><p>“You shouldn’t litter.”</p><p>“Yeah, fuck,” he says, like he regrets it, but it’s lost amongst the trees, now. Charley’s panting, all Rottweiler smile, and Sam crouches down to pet him. “Do you have a second?” he asks her, looking up.</p><p>“I mean, I stopped, didn’t I?”</p><p>Soft laugher. “That you did. Then, uh…” He stands again. “Have you seen… Brigitte? At school, or?”</p><p>“Yeah. Every day this week. Why, she doesn’t come by?”</p><p>Sam shrugs. “Just… I thought she might.”</p><p>“She’s fine,” Trina says. “Her and her freaky sister. Totally normal. I mean not <em>normal</em>, they’re totally fucking weird, but. Normal for then.”</p><p>Sam exhales something like relief, but just nods and opens up his cigarettes again, but he’s still all over this jangle of anxiety and she finds that she can’t really just… leave. So Trina calls softly to her dog and goes to sit down on the nearby bench. She pulls her leg up, pretends to re-lace her sneaker. “Why don’t you just come to the school?” she says. “You had no problem just showing up before. Or, what happened?” Trina asks. Sam glances at her, cigarette between his lips. He digs around for his lighter. Trina just watches. “Something happened,” she says, softly. She knows him well enough to not need an answer. “It was pretty obvious something might. Like months ago, it was obvious.”</p><p>“Trina, I… what you said before—”</p><p>“What, that I’d tell on you? That you’re a cherry hound?”</p><p>“I’m not,” Sam says, sounding tired. “It just… happened this way.”</p><p>Trina takes a deep breath, stares out past the trees to where she can just barely see the lake — as grey as the sky overhead — shimmerless between dark, wet tree trunks. “I know you’re not,” she says, soft. “But you still used me.”</p><p>Sam rubs his hand over his forehead, cigarette still held between his fingers like a joint. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he means it. “You deserved better.”</p><p>“I know,” she says. Just like that. Because she does. </p><p>Sam exhales and then comes to sit down beside her, not too close. Charley gets his body right between their legs, sits between them, his body a warmth against her calf, and Trina watches Sam roll the cherry off his cigarette and put it back in his pack. He’s been trying to cut but as long as she’s known him and she thinks about telling him that just lighting that one up again in ten seconds doesn’t actually mean he’s smoking less, but she doesn’t. Instead she says “It wasn’t all bad.”</p><p>“No, it wasn’t,” Sam agrees. “I just… last year, you said something like… like if I did something to her— to Brigitte… just, I never meant to fuck anything up for you, Trina. I didn’t mean to do anything to—.”</p><p><em>Do you think I </em>did<em> something to you?</em></p><p>Suddenly she kind of feels like crying because sometimes it’s easier for her to pretend that Sam doesn’t care about her. That he didn’t. “I mean,” she says, and she can’t look at him. She leans over her thighs, and drops her hands between her knees, wrists up — examining her fingernails, painted blue. “Not on purpose.”</p><p>And they both go quiet for a long time. Finally Sam says, “Sorry…” and then, with feeling, breathes out this “<em>fuck</em>.”</p><p>“Back then,” Trina says, “I just didn’t want her to… it wasn’t about you, really. I just didn’t want her to have something that I couldn’t. Maybe that’s totally stupid. But she’s always fucking— I thought, ‘what the fuck has she ever done to deserve this?’ but I also, I dunno, Sam — I <em>hated</em> you because I felt fucking used, and you were so mean to me, after you ended it. But I know I used you, too. I know I kept, pushing… It was fucked up between us, but you should’n’t’ve <em>treated</em> me like that. You basically just fucking ignored me, in front of everyone, in front of all my friends, and then showed up at school for <em>her</em>, and honestly I was like… I just had to think it wasn’t just me who was so goddamn stupid, that I fell for it. For you.” She exhales hard. “I know you went into it differently. Like, I know you thought I was… older, or different, or whatever. Maybe it was just easier to call you a cherry hound, ‘cause everyone… It’s always girls who suffer the most. Like, at school and… I thought ‘this is so not fucking fair that now I’m a slut and you just got to just walk away from it all.’ Nothing touched you. Maybe I was jealous of her, I don’t know.”</p><p>They sit quietly for a moment, and then Trina continues. “I guess something did happen to me, but it wasn’t just you. It was… us, and Morely dying, and my friends all abandoning me like I was nothing. It was a lot of things…”</p><p>“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Trina.”</p><p>Suddenly, Trina laughs. “I wish it was like this when we were together. I had no idea how to talk to you back then. I tried <em>so</em> hard to be who I thought you wanted.”</p><p>“I did want you,” Sam admits, very soft. “It just…”</p><p>Their eyes meet and Trina has to look away. “I know,” she says, and she does. Whatever she felt for him has shifted, in the time between then and now. She still feels something, a lot, but it’s not so overwhelming, or so desperate. Trina doesn’t need anything from him, but still, it’s nice to hear it.</p><p>Sam looks away again, but Trina doesn’t. “Anyway” she begins, “it’s obvious that you and her are… you really like her. So what the hell are you doing here with me?” Because that’s really what he’s here for, right? To ask about Brigitte?</p><p>“I dunno,” Sam tells her. “She hasn’t shown in a while.”</p><p>“Maybe she thinks you’re not into her. If you haven’t said anything.”</p><p>“She knows,” Sam says. “Or… I mean, I said that if she wanted, we could be…” he takes a breath. “Together, or… whatever she wanted. I thought we were on the same page, but… fuck, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. She’s probably better off without me, anyway.”</p><p>“Oh, right,” Trina says. “Because that would be just like you, Sam. You realize that this is all bigger than what you were willing to admit to yourself, and now that it’s out there, now that you’ve said something that’s real, you back out. It’s self-sabotage.”</p><p>“It’s not—”</p><p>“Okay, like—” Trina interrupts. “D’you ever think that maybe the reason you haven’t actually gone to <em>look</em> for her is ‘cause you’ll see that she still cares? Like, it’s not actually about how you’re afraid to hurt her, because you know you won’t. Jesus, Sam, like did you ever think, just once, that it’s because you think that <em>you’re</em> not good enough?” </p><p>“For her? For you? Yeah, I think that every goddamn day,” he says.</p><p>“No, I mean— it’s because you think you’re not good enough to have just… <em>something</em> good, for once. I’m not just talking about people. As soon as something might do a bit of good for you, you freak and try to bail. And then you chain smoke, and you put the fucking rye back in your glove compartment, and you sleep all day, and you just hide from all the people closest to you until you feel safe in your stupid, fucking— isolation. You don’t think you deserve something better than this.” Trina says, waving vaguely at everything, at this place, this moment, this life. “I know, Sam, you and me have always been the same that way. It was one of the only things we had in common. So, like, maybe you should just try believing in your own worth a little, it’ll make you feel better.”</p><p>For a moment he looks like she’s struck him. She kind of feels like she has, and they both keep other’s gaze, catching their breath.</p><p>“…Jesus,” Sam finally says. “…okay. Wow.” </p><p>Trina sighs and looks away first. “Just go talk to her, Sam, if you genuinely want to see her. But just stop acting like everything’s going to fail all the time.”</p><p>They fall quiet. Crows are cawing, somewhere, but other than that and the wind, it’s the only sound. It doesn’t really feel like spring, Trina thinks. She checks her watch. “I should go,” she tells him.</p><p>“Thanks, Trina,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.</p><p>“I’d apologize for being a bitch, but I’m not actually sorry,” she says, honestly.</p><p>“Actually, I think that might have been one of the nicest things anyone’s said to me in a while.”</p><p>She laughs a little as she stands up, pulling her headphones back over her ears. Just before she turns her music on, Sam says. “You do, too. Deserve good things.”</p><p>“I’m trying to remember that,” she tells him, and then she clicks her music back on, and she’s gone.</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>Of course, she’s been thinking of him. Of what she feels, what she wants to do. She didn’t give him an answer that morning — when he said they could be… anything, really. And Brigitte wants something like that close, thrumming intensity of Sam kissing her, but she isn’t even sure if she knows how to be friends, first. Because there’s only ever been Ginger, and that, she knows, carries its own weight and intensity that makes it, outside of the two of them, not quite right. It wouldn’t be right for her and Sam.</p><p>She thinks, <em>what if we just do this and then it all goes to hell? </em></p><p>A week later, she’s still undecided, and rapidly slipping back into last autumn’s mentality of having been away too long. Away from the greenhouse and Sam and everything that might exist between them. But she can’t get it out of her head. In the end, it’s almost like she wills his presence into existence because she’s sitting in the school library alone on her free period, erasing for what feels like the fifteenth time, a word she’s written down wrong because her thoughts are elsewhere. The paper tears, worn thin beneath the eraser, and she huffs a frustrated sigh and looks out the window just as Sam’s van pulls into view in the parking lot below. </p><p>It’s barely ten in the morning, and besides it’s not even a selling day. He’s just here to collect his pay cheque, probably, or something else that isn’t going to give her enough time to even get downstairs before he’s gone.</p><p>That’s her logical thought process. For about three seconds. And then she's gathering up all her things in a chaotic rush before she bolts. The librarian doesn’t even have time to tell her not to run, just looks at her in confusion as Brigitte flashes past her desk.</p><p>The movement helps — the motion — her uncertainty floats somewhere beneath it and she thinks, stumbling on the stairs, that she doesn’t even know what she’s going to say to him. It’s not like she has an answer, it’s just— she just wants to see him. She doesn’t want him to think she’s bailing, it’s just that every time she imagines the walk to the greenhouse, and how the conversation that follows might go, she’s overwhelmed. She’s too awkward for all of this, too reserved, and everything’s been changing since last year and she’s barely found her footing…</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>He scans the bleachers in the distance as he heads back to his van in case Brigitte’s out there, smoking. The weather’s been nice enough, lately, to sit outside without freezing, and even the sun is trying, weakly, to coax new life from the thawing earth. Still, she's not out there or, at least, he doesn’t see her.</p><p>There’s a muted crash from several feet behind him — metal on metal and he glances back to Brigitte, propelled from one of the school’s side doors, her fingers just leaving the metal push bar. </p><p>Sam turns back. She drops her binder accidentally and comes to a dead stop. Most of her stuff is sort of haphazardly clutched against her chest and the binder causes a dominoes effect and she drops her textbook, too. Her eyes are on his. It’s one of those strangely silent mornings where even birdsong sounds too loud and sudden. For now, there’s nothing — no sound — just the two of them.</p><p>“Hey,” she says, almost casually, despite the fact that she’s clearly run from wherever she was. That’s what gets him the most, he thinks, and while she’s catching her breath he kind of loses his as his chest tightens.</p><p>“Hey,” he says, and hears the laughter in it. He lets himself, a little. “What’s going on?”</p><p>It’s a greeting, simple, meaningless. She drops her bag onto the ground next to the rest of her fallen stuff and flexes her fingers — it’s heavy. Sam steps towards her like he’s propelled — half thinks he’ll help her pick up her things, ask her if she wants a cigarette, or just pretend that everything’s the same as it’s always been. Because he’d do that, too, just for the assurance that they can keep spending time together. He doesn’t need this to be anything, he just wants her. Her company.</p><p>“Hey,” she says again, softer, and it shakes a little as he reaches her. And he has every intention of picking up her bag or one of her books, but he blinks and he’s slid his hand up her arm to cup her narrow shoulder instead. She’s holding her coat in her arms — it’s the last thing she’s carrying.</p><p>“Hi,” he answers, barely a whisper, and it should feel like the most inane excuse for a conversation ever, but it’s something else — just a cover for what they’re really doing which is checking in, testing the way they used to fit, testing if it will hold. </p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She swallows whatever else she was going to say, because it was just filler, anyway. She isn’t sure whether she moves into that touch, or if it’s all Sam, but she thinks she does. Or maybe it’s just the natural flow of movement between them — the way they’ve always founds ways to hold together, even when they weren’t sure they knew how. Somewhere along the line, Sam’s become safe, unquestionably, until even the shadow of all the things Brigitte’s been told about her role and his in <em>how the world works</em> dissipates to nothing much at all. With Sam, those are just stories. Campfire ghosts. </p><p>For a moment, his arms are around her, his face is in her hair, and she’s still clutching her coat, holding it awkwardly against her stomach between them, but her other hand finds the back of his jacket and holds on and she catches her breath, even if her heart keeps beating like she’s running, still. </p><p>He’s like when you think you’re drowning, but then suddenly there’s warm earth beneath you — steadying. A place to catch your breath until the water that seemed so treacherous before seems suddenly calmer from the constant promise of this shore.</p><p>
  <strong>SAM</strong>
</p><p>They step apart maybe too fast. Or too slow. Neither of them wants to be doing this in a parking lot, anyway and she looks at him in that familiar way — like she’s ready for anything. “Want to go for a drive?” he asks her, and she nods. They gather up her things, and go.</p><p>Maybe they both intended to have her back at school by next period, or at least by lunch, but it doesn’t happen. It’s like they both know the point where they’ve driven too far away, the moment when they both know today is going to be this — the two of them — instead of classes and the greenhouse, and something crackles between them like electricity, an almost giddy kind of high. </p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>He gets her home by sunset, parked outside her house but still on the street — <em>like leaving</em> — Brigitte thinks. And it’s in the harsh orange light that catches them at angles through the windshield, and in the cold evening air that infiltrates the truck almost immediately after he shuts the car off, that she finally says what she’s been piecing together all day long.</p><p>“I think we should do this,” she says, and then looks at him, and he’s all trepidation.</p><p>“But—” he prompts, and she nods, taking a breath. Because of course, that’s how the sentence continues.</p><p>“But you know I’m leaving. Before next September. Me and Ginger, we promised. So.”</p><p>“So what is that?” Sam says. “September 19th, right?”</p><p>And she’s almost startled that he’s remembered her birthday. She nods again.</p><p>“Just so we’re clear, here,” he says, “You mean getting out of this town right? Not—”</p><p>“Yeah,” she says. “I’m not… I’m not dying. I won’t let her, either. So… so… yeah.”</p><p>“Four months,” he says. </p><p>“About that… Maybe less. Just… before the 19th.”</p><p>He looks away from her, squints at the sun, then touches the steering wheel like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. She’s shaking, and it’s not from the cold. She thinks <em>what do you want to do?</em> but she can’t quite bring herself to ask.</p><p>“I don’t know if I’ve ever been broken up with in advance before,” Sam says, and she gives him a look that almost breaks into a smile. He catches it though, knows how to find it in her face, and she smiles back. “Okay, yeah,” Sam says. “I mean, I’m in. Let’s do this.”</p><p>And somehow, even though she felt like they were on the same wavelength, she’s startled anyway. “Oh… ‘Kay,” she says.</p><p>“Okay,” he repeats. “And… tell me if you need anything. Even if it’s a ride out of town, I… you know. I’m here. I’ll be here.”</p><p>And she thinks <em>you don’t have to be</em>, but she knows she can’t ask Sam to come with them. This was always theirs — hers and Ginger’s. And it just wouldn’t be right. Right? Suddenly she doesn’t know, and it’s too much to think about right now.</p><p>“I should go,” she says.</p><p>“See you…?” he begins</p><p>“Tomorrow,” she finishes. Like a promise. </p><p>“See you tomorrow, Brigitte.”</p><p>It’s the way he says her name, maybe, that gives her the nerve to say what she’s thinking. “I think this is the part where you kiss me,” she says, too soft to be a stage-whisper, but the implication is there. Like he’s forgotten his lines. </p><p>Sam laughs out loud, and then does.</p><p>~</p><p>Just before summer, Brigitte, Ginger, and Pamela uproot the bush Henry planted in the yard themselves, and it’s no easy task, but once it’s loosened, it comes out like a rotted tooth, slides suddenly from the earth in a shower of earwigs and pale, sunless spiders, and other things that crawl back into the dark too quickly to be properly seen. Brigitte puts the hellebore in its place.</p><p>That summer, Ginger changes still — swings between affectionate and solitary, and Brigitte just tries to keep up, at first. By July, though, they both settle into something a little easier. For the first time since the end of April, Ginger actually acknowledges Sam's existence in conversation, and something opens up between them again, like a conduit, and it’s all a little easier, after that.</p><p>~</p><p>One evening she and Ginger are lying on a blanket, stripped from Brigitte’s bed, in the backyard. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower, but so far, nothing. Around them, crickets chirp in one long, endless, shrill sound that Brigitte finds sort of comforting. It means nothing else is moving out there in the dark. She can smell someone burning brush in their backyard, somewhere, and it reminds her of autumn.</p><p>Ginger’s fingers find hers, and she laces them in an almost distracted way and Brigitte wonders if the smoke will obscure the stars.</p><p>
  <strong>GINGER</strong>
</p><p>“Did you fuck him yet?” Ginger asks, and Brigitte’s silence amongst the scream of crickets is answer enough. Ginger rolls over to face her, jaw dropping. “<em>When</em>?” she asks, her voice squeaking slightly, in the face of Brigitte’s silence, and watches her sister squeeze her eyes shut for a second.</p><p>She says “Um, two weeks ago?” like she doesn’t know <em>exactly</em> when, and for a moment Ginger’s speechless. </p><p>“Wh— and you didn’t tell me?”</p><p>Brigitte’s eyes find hers for a moment, and then she looks away. “I just— it didn’t seem like—”</p><p>And Ginger tries to push her thoughts past her shock, her vague sense of betrayal, and comes out saying more or less what she meant to: “You should’ve said. I mean you could’ve. I mean, I c— you know you can, right?”</p><p>Brigitte nods. “It just felt sort of… um…”</p><p>“I mean are you gonna like— ‘cause my first time was like a negative two out of ten, so, I mean—”</p><p>“I’m not gonna <em>rate</em>—” Brigitte begins, but Ginger’s clambered half on top of her, pinning her to the blanket like she might try to flee. It’s almost playful, but Brigitte stops speaking and looks up at her, unguarded as always, and Ginger’s caught there, for a moment, under her gaze. For a moment, she feels a sense of loss.</p><p>“I’m not gonna rate it,” Brigitte says, after the moment’s stretched on a little too long.</p><p>“Worse or better?”</p><p>“Than negative <em>two</em>?” </p><p>Ginger nods.</p><p>Brigitte hesitates. “…better.”</p><p>“Better than five?”</p><p>“Ginger, no,” Brigitte says, reaching up to shove at her, like Ginger's a dog that's being bad.</p><p>“Come on,” Ginger says, and lets herself be pushed back, flopping back down to the blanket, but wriggling close enough so that their shoulders touch. She tilts her head into Brigitte’s and they go quiet for a while. </p><p>“I think the world pits us against each other,” Ginger says softly.</p><p>“Who?”</p><p>“Like girls. Women.”</p><p>“…Yeah.”</p><p>“Like, guys are shit,” Ginger says, “But. Like isn’t it fucking incredulous that they try to make girls hate each other, too?”</p><p>“I think you mean 'insidious'.”</p><p>“Like, we…” Ginger continues, as though she didn’t hear the correction, “are so much fucking stronger than just some guys coming between us. You and me, right? But I think maybe all women… like they make us fucking… judge and hate and bitch, but we’re so…” Ginger laughs a little. “Nothing can stop us.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Brigitte whispers, and she’s so fucking filled with it — with understanding that, understanding exactly what Ginger means, that she almost wants to cry. She fingers Ginger’s wrist, finds her hand, and holds on tight, and Ginger squeezes back.</p><p>Brigitte takes in this little breath suddenly and then says “I saw one. A shooting star.”</p><p>Ginger squints up at the sky which is the same as always. “You did not,”</p><p>“Look,” Brigitte tells her, and Ginger tucks herself a little closer, and does. The stars twinkle, but nothing moves.</p><p>“Saw two,” Brigitte says after a moment, eyes on the stars.</p><p>“Fuck— are you kidding? Where?”</p><p>“Just <em>look</em>. Look.”</p><p>Ginger looks, but her thoughts are elsewhere. She turns her face to Brigitte’s “But seriously,” she says, “was it good with Sam?”</p><p>“Ginge, <em>stop</em>,” </p><p>“Bet it sucked,” Ginger goads.</p><p>“Think what you want.”</p><p>“I will.”</p><p>Ginger slides her thumb softly over Brigitte’s, fingers still loosely interlocked, and wonders when she stopped feeling like she had to hold onto her so fucking tightly.</p><p>“…It was nice,” Brigitte says. Ginger exhales something like relief and looks back up at the sky, where there’s another flare of dying light.</p><p>“Three,” They say in unison.</p><p>~</p><p>The countdown calendar shows one day until out by sixteen.</p><p>Brigitte went to the greenhouse, which Ginger expected, leaving her to wander the house like a haunting, until Pamela calls her into the kitchen to help make a cake for Brigitte’s birthday which Ginger thinks is sort of hilarious and sad because Brigitte has never really liked sweet things, and also she won’t be able to eat it anyway, because they’re leaving before sunrise.</p><p>For a moment she imagines Pamela with the lit birthday cake, finding herself all alone in the house, and Ginger almost feels like the air is sucked from her lungs. She presses the heel of her hand to the kitchen counter and looks up.</p><p>Her mother is humming to herself, standing on one of the dining room chairs to go through the upper cabinets for the bottle of vanilla she’s <em>sure</em> is back there somewhere and Ginger thinks, suddenly, that maybe all of this… maybe it’s kind of unfair. She pretends it’s a thought that’s occurring to her just now, and not one that’s been sitting in the back of her mind for months and months.</p><p>She thinks of Brigitte at the greenhouse, now. Thinks of how she promised she’d come home tonight and how she wouldn’t want to wake Sam up at four in the morning anyway just to leave, and how she’s pretending she’s not sad, because this is supposed to be liberation. It was always meant to make them free.</p><p>And they weren’t supposed to get attached. To this place, this life. Ginger isn’t supposed to care whether or not Pam finds the vanilla for this goddamn birthday cake that will never get eaten, and that Brigitte won’t like anyway. And Brigitte wasn’t supposed to fall for the county dealer, and he wasn’t supposed to like her back either. And Ginger never meant to walk around this house like she was trying to remember every part of it. She wasn’t supposed to think about their All Hallows Christmas tree last year, or how she likes this place better with Henry gone, or how their mother is almost bearable, sometimes.</p><p>She isn’t supposed to crawl on top of the counter to dig through another cupboard while Pam says “Oh, jeeze, Ginger get down from there.”</p><p>She isn’t supposed to want any of this...</p><p>(“Found it,” she says, holding up the little bottle.)</p><p>...But she kinda does.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <strong>BRIGITTE</strong>
</p><p>She leaves the greenhouse and she doesn’t cry, and Sam doesn’t tell her not to go because he knows she will, whether or not he wants her to.</p><p>She hurries down the basement steps and finds Ginger standing over the bag she’s packing, so many of their things spread out across the bedspread. Brigitte takes a deep breath and tries to shake off this feeling of loss. She goes to stand opposite her, taking in everything Ginger’s planning to bring.</p><p>“Should we bring any books?” Brigitte asks her, and is met with silence. She looks up and catches Ginger’s eyes.</p><p>“Too heavy.” Ginger finally says, then wets her lips and continues “And I just th—” she clears her throat. “I just thought, um… maybe we should do something different.”</p><p>“What do you mean?” Brigitte asks, feeling something anxious and black start spreading out through the centre of her.</p><p>“No,” Ginger says, reading her mind. “Like… what if we… jesus. What if we change the plan, like… to something else? Because what if— what if we hitchhike outta here, and then the guy’s a total creep. I don’t want to end up on <em>Unsolved Mysteries</em>, you know? Or what if we can’t— what if we can’t find work?”</p><p>“I dunno…” Brigitte says, and thinks vaguely that it’s unfair that she’s kept all these worries to herself because Ginger would find them stupid —<em> let’s just </em>go<em>, Bee</em> — and yet here they are.</p><p>“I just… I dunno,” Ginger says, visibly deflating a little. “I dunno, it feels wrong. Doesn’t it? Does it?”</p><p>“Wrong how?”</p><p>“Just… maybe we should finish high school. It’s one more year, and besides, I’ve barely <em>seen</em> Trina, so that’s an improvement already. And the guys don’t catcall us anymore. Like what if we just get through next year… we could— I mean, you could get into college. You get into university somewhere fucking else, somewhere not here, and I’ll, I dunno, work to support your fucking— Victorian lifestyle.”</p><p>“Like a benefactor,” Brigitte says.</p><p>Ginger looks up at her, staring. “...I feel like you’re not taking this seriously.”</p><p>“I am. And you should go to university, too."</p><p>"<em>Fuck</em> no."</p><p>"What happened?” Brigitte asks, getting back on track. “Why are we changing it now? We’re supposed to leave tomorrow.”</p><p>“Today,” Ginger says. She points to the digital clock. It’s 12:03 a.m. “Happy birthday,” she says. “Also, Pamela’s made you a cake and it’s chocolate, and you’re gonna hate it. I saw her put in like at least a cup and a half of sugar, it made my teeth hurt just lookin’ at it.”</p><p>“But…”</p><p>“I kept thinking about her being here in this fucking house all alone, and like— if we leave now, aren’t we just like, no better than Henry? And you—… you and Sam, I dunno. I mean unless you’re happy to be done with him, I dunno. I know you’re not.”</p><p>“So what’re you saying?”</p><p>“I’m scared, Bee,” Ginger says. It rushes from her, honest and vulnerable. </p><p>“I’ll be there.”</p><p>“I know but… I dunno, I feel like we’re not done here, yet. Like we haven’t… it doesn’t feel right.”</p><p>And Brigitte nods, slowly, because she’s felt that for a long time, but she never expected Ginger to come around to it, too. “So what do we do?” she asks.</p><p>“I dunno… we’ve got time to figure it out, though. Right? We can redo the countdown calendar…”</p><p>“Let’s scrap it,” Brigitte says, softly. “Let’s just figure it out without a deadline.”</p><p>Brigitte meets her eyes and Ginger nods.</p><p>“Okay. Okay, yeah.”</p><p>“Okay,” Brigitte echoes.</p><p>~</p><p>“What about the Pact?” Ginger asks, after they’ve put everything back in its proper place, pushed the bag back under the bed, emptied. It felt like a ritual, like clearing away any trace of evidence that they were going to run away. Like preparing the space for a new beginning.</p><p>Brigitte turns back to her, facing her across their beds like they had last Halloween, only this time it’s just her sister — different, transformed, but not a monster. And below the surface, Brigitte’s changed, too. She’s learned a little better how to feel comfortable in her own skin. </p><p>She thinks that the plans they make now are planned together, not just orchestrated by Ginger, who — in the end — only ever did the best she could, in a world that wasn’t built for her. For either of them.</p><p>And Brigitte says, “We don’t need it, anymore.”</p><p>~</p><p>She stands outside the main door to the greenhouse with her fingers on the brass handle and wonders how this is going to go. She still doesn’t even exactly know how she feels about it, about staying in Bailey Downs until next year. Just that there is this undercurrent of relief and, for now, that’s enough.</p><p>She doesn’t know what happens next. She doesn’t even know if her and Sam are still in this together, or if her leaving — not leaving — will change that. All she knows is that when she left here last night he'd held onto her hand like he didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t say it. She knows he let go because <em>she</em> was decided, and not because he wanted to see her walk out the door.</p><p>She thinks of all the times this past year she should have shown up for Sam, and didn’t. Couldn’t. All the times she waited weeks. But it’s September 19th, only just mid-morning, and she’s here, now.</p><p>She pushes the greenhouse door open and steps inside.</p><p>Sam looks up from behind the counter and she watches his face change. Surprise and then something that looks like how she feels. It’s an awful lot like hope.</p><p>“Hey,” he says. “You came.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Find me on tumblr!<br/><a href="https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com/"><b>liminalweirdo</b></a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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